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The Magic Skin (驴皮记)
The Magic Skin (驴皮记)
The Magic Skin (驴皮记)
by Honore de Balzac
THE TALISMAN
Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law
which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He
mounted the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by
the number 36, without too much deliberation.
"Your hat, sir, if you please?" a thin, querulous voice called out. A
little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly
rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.
As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done
to compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are
about to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our
social sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you
happen to have written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the
measurement of your skull required for the compilation of statistics
as to the cerebral capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely
silent on this point. But be sure of this, that though you have
scarcely taken a step towards the tables, your hat no more belongs to
you now than you belong to yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune,
your cap, your cane, your cloak.
The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered
tally in exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed
at the brim, showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted;
and the little old man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the
furious pleasures of a gambler's life, cast a dull, indifferent glance
over him, in which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in
the hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless
suicides, life-long penal servitude and transportations to
Guazacoalco.
His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past
anguish in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at
Darcet's, and gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some
old hackney which takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing
could move him now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they
passed out, their mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him
impassive. He was the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had
noticed this sorry Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, "There is
only a pack of cards in that heart of his."
The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put
here, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold
of all evil haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle
of coin brought his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of
greed. Most likely he had been drawn thither by that most convincing
of Jean Jacques' eloquent periods, which expresses, I think, this
melancholy thought, "Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to
gambling when he sees only his last shilling between him and death."
Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
Only with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving
in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has
neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the
scourge of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a
coup of trente-et-quarante. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes
whose calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem
as if they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The
grandest hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain
has bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud
of her Palais-Royal, where the inevitable roulettes cause blood to
flow in streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching
without fear of their feet slipping in it.
Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the
convenience of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table
stands in the middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the
friction of gold, but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an
odd indifference to luxury in the men who will lose their lives here
in the quest of the fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.
After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which
is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting
upon all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of
his nature. We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.
There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green
table. Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of
theirs betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long
forgotten how to throb, even when a woman's dowry was the stake. A
young Italian, olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his
elbows on the table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck
that dictate a gambler's "Yes" or "No." The glow of fire and gold was
on that southern face. Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of
an audience, awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the
faces of the actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the
croupier's rake, much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the
headsman in the Place de Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare
coat, held a card in one hand, and a pin in the other, to mark the
numbers of Red or Black. He seemed a modern Tantalus, with all the
pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a hoardless miser drawing in
imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic who consoles himself in his
misery by chimerical dreams, a man who touches peril and vice as a
young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer in the white mass.
The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, "Make your game!" as the young
man came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned
curiously towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The
jaded elders, the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical
Italian himself, felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger.
Is he not wretched indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be
very helpless to receive sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a
shudder in these places, where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness
looks gay, and despair is decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a
new emotion in these torpid hearts as the young man entered. Were not
executioners known to shed tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads
that had to fall at the bidding of the Revolution?
The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks
told of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the
suicide had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved
faint lines about the corners of his mouth, and there was an
abandonment about him that was painful to see. Some sort of demon
sparkled in the depths of his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with
pleasure. Could it have been dissipation that had set its foul mark on
the proud face, once pure and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor
seeing the yellow circles about his eyelids, and the color in his
cheeks, would have set them down to some affection of the heart or
lungs, while poets would have attributed them to the havoc brought by
the search for knowledge and to night-vigils by the student's lamp.
But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When a
notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners
welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince
among them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined
wretchedness of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut,
but his cravat was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one
could suspect him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's were
not perfectly clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear
gloves. If the very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because
some traces of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre,
delicately-shaped form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.
He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice
in his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation
and existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled
beauty and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost
his radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were
ready to bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be
seized with pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.
The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood there,
flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without
deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can,
he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless
subterfuges in scorn.
The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters
laid nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler's
enthusiasm, smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of
coin against the stranger's stake.
The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have
reduced to an inarticulate cry--"Make your game. . . . The game is
made. . . . Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and
seemed to wish luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the
losses or gains of those who took part in these sombre pleasures.
Every bystander thought he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble
life, in the fortunes of that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes
on the prophetic cards; but however closely they watched the young
man, they could discover not the least sign of feeling on his cool but
restless face.
"Even! red wins," said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle
came from the Italian's throat when he saw the folded notes that the
banker showered upon him, one after another. The young man only
understood his calamity when the croupiers's rake was extended to
sweep away his last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little
click, as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold
before the bank. The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut
his eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color
returned as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can
offer no new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of
entreaty for compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the
bystanders. How much can happen in a second's space; how many things
depend on a throw of the die!
"That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, smiling
after a moment's silence, during which he picked up the coin between
his finger and thumb and held it up.
"If we had but followed HIS example," said an old gamester to the
others, as he pointed out the Italian.
"He is a new hand," said the banker, "or he would have divided his
money into three parts to give himself more chance."
The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old
watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him
without a word. The gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went
downstairs whistling Di tanti Palpiti so feebly, that he himself
scarcely heard the delicious notes.
How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the midst of millions of
fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large.
Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a
young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending
ideas have striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside;
what moans and what despair have been repressed; what abortive
masterpieces and vain endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of
sorrow. Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas
of literature that can compare with this paragraph:
Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
even that old frontispiece, The Lamentations of the glorious king of
Kaernavan, put in prison by his children, the sole remaining fragment
of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the
same Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.
The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and
of memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among
the green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all
decreed that he should die.
He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly
at the water.
"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman, who
grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"
His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S APPARATUS.
A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his
features, over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and
his dark cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots
that flit over the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is
with the black ashes, so it was with his face, it became dull again
when the stranger quickly drew out his hand and perceived three
pennies. "Ah, kind gentleman! carita, carita; for the love of St.
Catherine! only a halfpenny to buy some bread!"
A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man's last pence.
Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old pauvre honteux, sickly
and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
thick, muffled voice:
But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment
of wretchedness more bitter than his own.
The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the
Seine fretted him beyond endurance.
The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision
of luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of
his would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the
shops, listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came
to an end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre
Dame, of the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments
seemed to have taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.
The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
Livius. The young man beheld Senatus Populusque Romanus; consuls,
lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the
angry people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a
dream.
India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap
of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by,
a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out
a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed
Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of a
people who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an
indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A salt-
cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop carried him back to the
Renaissance at its height, to the time when there was no restraint on
art or morals, when torture was the sport of sovereigns; and from
their councils, churchmen with courtesans' arms about them issued
decrees of chastity for simple priests.
He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if
under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt
to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects
about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but
the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to
need illumination from without. The most extravagant whims of
prodigals, who have run through millions to perish in garrets, had
left their traces here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here,
beside a writing desk, made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold
for a hundred pence, lay a lock with a secret worth a king's ransom.
The human race was revealed in all the grandeur of its wretchedness;
in all the splendor of its infinite littleness. An ebony table that an
artist might worship, carved after Jean Goujon's designs, in years of
toil, had been purchased perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious
caskets, and things that fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there
in heaps like rubbish.
"You must have the worth of millions here!" cried the young man as he
entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt
by eighteenth century artists.
"Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid shopman; "but
you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
see!"
The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a
poem of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates,
wonderful cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's
skill palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art
itself became hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a
Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio
never received the glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of
antique porphyry carved round about with pictures of the most
grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the pride of some Corinna,
scarcely drew a smile from him.
"Ah, monsieur keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture
to tell him."
"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished,
each looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's
silence as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.
Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you
read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you
hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss
of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to
civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and
layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of
the Ural range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of
peoples forgotten by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent
divine tradition, peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of
earth that yields bread to us and flowers.
Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt
cities, like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with
all the secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has
discovered a giant population from the footprints of a mammoth. These
forms stand erect, grow large, and fill regions commensurate with
their giant size. He treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a
seven by him produces awe.
All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young
man's mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that
besets the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more
than ever for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let
his eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past.
The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's heads smiled on him, the
statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a
motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his
brain; each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the
canvas closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to
tremble and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly,
gracefully or awkwardly, according to its fashion, character, and
surroundings.
He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress.
He could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by
the vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were
blotted out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had
suddenly come. Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of
the things about him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep
overcame him, brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many
thoughts that lacerated his heart.
Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was
left visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm,
thin as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its
light upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray
pointed beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and
gave him the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as
models for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a
close inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid
face. His great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the
inexorably stern expression of his small green eyes that no longer
possessed eyebrows or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that
Gerard Dow's "Money Changer" had come down from his frame. The
craftiness of an inquisitor, revealed in those curving wrinkles and
creases that wound about his temples, indicated a profound knowledge
of life. There was no deceiving this man, who seemed to possess a
power of detecting the secrets of the wariest heart.
The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in
his passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been
heaped up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil
luminous vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the
haughty power of a man who knows all things.
With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of
the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the
forehead, mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have
sacrificed all the joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows
beneath his potent will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the
thought of the life led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from
our world; joyless, since he had no one illusion left; painless,
because pleasure had ceased to exist for him. There he stood,
motionless and serene as a star in a bright mist. His lamp lit up the
obscure closet, just as his green eyes, with their quiet malevolence,
seemed to shed a light on the moral world.
This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's returning
sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief in
nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by
the scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a
piece of opium can produce.
But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and
in the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible.
The idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite, the
disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we
wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made
him tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been
stirred in the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other
great man, made illustrious by his genius or by fame.
He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall
on the brown case.
At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a
spring, and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its
groove, and discovered the canvas to the stranger's admiring gaze. At
sight of this deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the show-
rooms and the freaks of his dreams, and became himself again. The old
man became a being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with nothing
chimerical about him, and took up his existence at once upon solid
earth.
The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face,
exerted an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence
falling from heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the
marrow of his bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to
issue from among the shadows represented by a dark background; an
aureole of light shone out brightly from his hair; an impassioned
belief seemed to glow through him, and to thrill every feature. The
word of life had just been uttered by those red lips, the sacred
sounds seemed to linger still in the air; the spectator besought the
silence for those captivating parables, hearkened for them in the
future, and had to turn to the teachings of the past. The untroubled
peace of the divine eyes, the comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an
interpretation of the Evangel. The sweet triumphant smile revealed the
secret of the Catholic religion, which sums up all things in the
precept, "Love one another." This picture breathed the spirit of
prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame self, caused sleeping powers of
good to waken. For this work of Raphael's had the imperious charm of
music; you were brought under the spell of memories of the past; his
triumph was so absolute that the artist was forgotten. The witchery of
the lamplight heightened the wonder; the head seemed at times to
flicker in the distance, enveloped in cloud.
"I covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces," said the
merchant carelessly.
"And now for death!" cried the young man, awakened from his musings.
His last thought had recalled his fate to him, as it led him
imperceptibly back from the forlorn hopes to which he had clung.
"Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded!" said the other, and
his hands held the young man's wrists in a grip like that of a vice.
The younger man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said gently:
"You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but my own that
is in question. . . . But why should I hide a harmless fraud?" he went
on, after a look at the anxious old man. "I came to see your treasures
to while away the time till night should come and I could drown myself
decently. Who would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of
science?"
While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard face of his
pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the mournful tones of his
voice reassured him, or he also read the dark signs of fate in the
faded features that had made the gamblers shudder; he released his
"Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for three years
without receiving any perquisites?"
"Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth a little
too sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?"
"You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or you have had to
compose couplets to pay for your mistress' funeral? Do you want to be
cured of the gold fever? Or to be quit of the spleen? For what blunder
is your life forfeit?"
"You must not look among the common motives that impel suicides for
the reason of my death. To spare myself the task of disclosing my
unheard-of sufferings, for which language has no name, I will tell you
this--that I am in the deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel
trouble, and," he went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the
words just uttered, "I have no wish to beg for either help or
sympathy."
"Eh! eh!"
The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled the sound of
a rattle. Then he went on thus:
"Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for
it, and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from
the Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a
single obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre
from the new, without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver,
or copper, notes or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and
of more consequence than a constitutional king."
The young man thought that the older was in his dotage, and waited in
bewilderment without venturing to reply.
The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at the sight of
a piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was
only about the size of a fox's skin, but it seemed to fill the deep
shadows of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a
small comet, an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young
sceptic went up to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him
from all points of view, and he soon found out the cause of its
singular brilliancy. The dark grain of the leather had been so
carefully burnished and polished, the striped markings of the graining
were so sharp and clear, that every particle of the surface of the bit
of Oriental leather was in itself a focus which concentrated the
light, and reflected it vividly.
"Ah," he cried, "here is the mark of the seal which they call in the
East the Signet of Solomon."
"So you know that, then?" asked the merchant. His peculiar method of
laughter, two or three quick breathings through the nostrils, said
more than any words however eloquent.
"Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe in that idle
fancy?" said the young man, nettled by the spitefulness of the silent
chuckle. "Don't you know," he continued, "that the superstitions of
the East have perpetuated the mystical form and the counterfeit
characters of the symbol, which represents a mythical dominion? I have
no more laid myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than
if I had mentioned sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology in
a manner admits."
"As you are an Orientalist," replied the other, "perhaps you can read
that sentence."
He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young man held
towards him, and pointed out some characters inlaid in the surface of
the wonderful skin, as if they had grown on the animal to which it
once belonged.
"I must admit," said the stranger, "that I have no idea how the
letters could be engraved so deeply on the skin of a wild ass." And he
turned quickly to the tables strewn with curiosities and seemed to
look for something.
"Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see whether the
letters are printed or inlaid."
The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to
cut the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin
shaving of leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so
clear and so exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he
was not sure that he had cut anything away after all.
"Yes," said the old man, "it is better to attribute it to man's agency
than to God's."
The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving the
other a look as he did so. "He has given up the notion of dying
already," the glance said with phlegmatic irony.
"I don't know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude
the fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their
opinion, I have doubted and refrained, and----"
"Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the young stranger.
"Tried it!" exclaimed the old man. "Suppose that you were on the
column in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into
space? Is it possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been
known to die by halves? Before you came here, you had made up your
mind to kill yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and
you think no more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your
life afford mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the
licentious days of Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have
begged my bread; but for all that, I am now a centenarian with a
couple of years to spare, and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the
making of me, ignorance has made me learned. I will tell you in a few
words the great secret of human life. By two instinctive processes man
exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms
which these two causes of death may take--To Will and To have your
Will. Between these two limits of human activity the wise have
discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and
long life. To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but
To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me Thought
has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary
functions of my economy. In a word, it is not in the heart which can
be broken, or in the senses that become deadened, but it is in the
brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, that I have
set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body unruffled. Yet, I have
seen the whole world. I have learned all languages, lived after every
manner. I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father's corpse as a
pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the security of his bare word,
signed contracts in every capital of Europe, and left my gold without
hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained everything, because I
have known how to despise all things.
"My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive
possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to
unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides
with you but an idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a
man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of
happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea,
unspoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a key to all treasures; the
miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above
this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys. I have
reveled in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains!
I have seen all things, calmly, and without weariness; I have set my
desires on nothing; I have waited in expectation of everything. I have
walked to and fro in the world as in a garden round about my own
dwelling. Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call
them, are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I
express and transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting
them to prey upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert
myself with them as if they were romances which I could read by the
power of vision within me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution,
I still enjoy robust health; and as my mind is endowed with all the
force that I have not wasted, this head of mine is even better
furnished than my galleries. The true millions lie here," he said,
striking his forehead. "I spend delicious days in communings with the
past; I summon before me whole countries, places, extents of sea, the
fair faces of history. In my imaginary seraglio I have all the women
that I have never possessed. Your wars and revolutions come up before
me for judgment. What is a feverish fugitive admiration for some more
or less brightly colored piece of flesh and blood; some more or less
rounded human form; what are all the disasters that wait on your
erratic whims, compared with the magnificent power of conjuring up the
whole world within your soul, compared with the immeasurable joys of
movement, unstrangled by the cords of time, unclogged by the fetters
of space; the joys of beholding all things, of comprehending all
things, of leaning over the parapet of the world to question the other
spheres, to hearken to the voice of God? There," he burst out,
vehemently, "there are To Will and To have your Will, both together,"
he pointed to the bit of shagreen; "there are your social ideas, your
immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures that end in death,
your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain is perhaps but a
violent pleasure. Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes
pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of
the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the
physical world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And what
is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?"
"Very good then, a life of riotous excess for me!" said the stranger,
pouncing upon the piece of shagreen.
"I had resolved my existence into thought and study," the stranger
replied; "and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be
gulled by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet,
nor yet by your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein
existence is no longer possible for me. . . . Let me see now," he
added, clutching the talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old
man, "I wish for a royal banquet, a carouse worthy of this century,
which, it is said, has brought everything to perfection! Let me have
young boon companions, witty, unwarped by prejudice, merry to the
verge of madness! Let one wine succeed another, each more biting and
perfumed than the last, and strong enough to bring about three days of
delirium! Passionate women's forms should grace that night! I would be
borne away to unknown regions beyond the confines of this world, by
the car and four-winged steed of a frantic and uproarious orgy. Let us
ascend to the skies, or plunge ourselves in the mire. I do not know if
one soars or sinks at such moments, and I do not care! Next, I bid
this enigmatical power to concentrate all delights for me in one
single joy. Yes, I must comprehend every pleasure of earth and heaven
in the final embrace that is to kill me. Therefore, after the wine, I
wish to hold high festival to Priapus, with songs that might rouse the
dead, and kisses without end; the sound of them should pass like the
crackling of flame through Paris, should revive the heat of youth and
passion in husband and wife, even in hearts of seventy years."
A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the young man's ears
like an echo from hell; and tyrannously cut him short. He said no
more.
"Do you imagine that my floors are going to open suddenly, so that
luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through them, and guests from
another world? No, no, young madcap. You have entered into the compact
now, and there is an end of it. Henceforward, your wishes will be
accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of
your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the
strength and number of your desires, from the least to the most
extravagant. The Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to
me that it would bring about a mysterious connection between the
fortunes and wishes of its possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one,
which I could fulfil, but I leave that to the issues of your new
existence. After all, you were wishing to die; very well, your suicide
is only put off for a time."
The stranger was surprised and irritated that this peculiar old man
persisted in not taking him seriously. A half philanthropic intention
peeped so clearly forth from his last jesting observation, that he
exclaimed:
"I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes in the
time it will take to cross the width of the quay. But I should like us
to be quits for such a momentous service; that is, if you are not
laughing at an unlucky wretch, so I wish that you may fall in love
with an opera-dancer. You would understand the pleasures of
intemperance then, and might perhaps grow lavish of the wealth that
you have husbanded so philosophically."
He went out without heeding the old man's heavy sigh, went back
through the galleries and down the staircase, followed by the stout
assistant who vainly tried to light his passage; he fled with the
haste of a robber caught in the act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he
did not even notice the unexpected flexibility of the piece of
shagreen, which coiled itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited
fingers, till it would go into the pocket of his coat, where he
mechanically thrust it. As he rushed out of the door into the street,
he ran up against three young men who were passing arm-in-arm.
"Brute!"
"Idiot!"
"Why, it is Raphael!"
"Good! we were looking for you."
"My dear fellow, you must come with us!" said the young man that
Raphael had all but knocked down.
By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his friends towards
the Pont des Arts; they surrounded him, and linked him by the arm
among their merry band.
"We have been after you for about a week," the speaker went on. "At
your respectable hotel de Saint Quentin, where, by the way, the sign
with the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs
out just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours
told us that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly
did not look like duns, creditors, sheriff's officers, or the like.
But no matter! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the
Bouffons; we took courage again, and made it a point of honor to find
out whether you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in
one of those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a
twopenny rope, or if, more luckily, you were bivouacking in some
boudoir or other. We could not find you anywhere. Your name was not in
the jailers' registers at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force! Government
departments, cafes, libraries, lists of prefects' names, newspaper
offices, restaurants, greenrooms--to cut it short, every lurking place
in Paris, good or bad, has been explored in the most expert manner. We
bewailed the loss of a man endowed with such genius, that one might
look to find him at Court or in the common jails. We talked of
canonizing you as a hero of July, and, upon my word, we regretted
you!"
As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but now
he had thought to fling himself, the old man's prediction had been
fulfilled, the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.
"We really regretted you," said his friend, still pursuing his theme.
"It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior
person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other
people. The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy,
more seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the
heroism of the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel
with her; but La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-
nilly you must take her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as you
know, authority passed over from the Tuileries to the journalists, at
the time when the Budget changed its quarters and went from the
Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not
know perhaps. The Government, that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and
bankers who represent the country to-day, just as the priests used to
do in the time of the monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying
the worthy people of France with a few new words and old ideas, like
philosophers of every school, and all strong intellects ever since
time began. So now Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by
proving to us that it is far better to pay twelve million francs,
thirty-three centimes to La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-
Such, than to pay eleven hundred million francs, nine centimes to a
king who used to say _I_ instead of WE. In a word, a journal, with two
or three hundred thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just
been started, with a view to making an opposition paper to content the
discontented, without prejudice to the national government of the
citizen-king. We scoff at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion
or incredulity quite impartially. And since, for us, 'our country'
means a capital where ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line,
a succulent dinner every day, and the play at frequent intervals,
where profligate women swarm, where suppers last on into the next day,
and light loves are hired by the hour like cabs; and since Paris will
always be the most adorable of all countries, the country of joy,
liberty, wit, pretty women, mauvais sujets, and good wine; where the
truncheon of authority never makes itself disagreeably felt, because
one is so close to those who wield it,--we, therefore, sectaries of
the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to whitewash the public mind, to
give fresh costumes to the actors, to put a new plank or two in the
government booth, to doctor doctrinaires, and warm up old Republicans,
to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and revictual the Centre; provided
that we are allowed to laugh in petto at both kings and peoples, to
think one thing in the morning and another at night, and to lead a
merry life a la Panurge, or to recline upon soft cushions, more
orientali.
"The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom," he went on, "we
have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner
given by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at
a loss to know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains
with it. You will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king
of these free lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity
discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either
Russia, Austria or England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you
with the sovereignty of those puissant intellects which give to the
world its Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs--all the
clever Crispins who treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers'
stakes, just as ordinary men play dominoes for Kirschenwasser. We have
given you out to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a
drinking-bout at close quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom
all bold spirits wish to try a fall with; we have gone so far as to
say that you have never yet been worsted. I hope you will not make
liars of us. Taillefer, our amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the
circumscribed saturnalias of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich
enough to infuse pomp into trifles, and style and charm into
dissipation . . . Are you listening, Raphael?" asked the orator,
interrupting himself.
"Crime----"
"There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine,"
said Raphael.
"Oh, you don't understand me; I mean political crime. Since this
morning, a conspirator's life is the only one I covet. I don't know
that the fancy will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my
gorge rises at the anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad
evenness. I am seized with a passion for the miseries of retreat from
Moscow, for the excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler's
life. I should like to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left
us here in France; it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord
Byrons who, having crumpled up their lives like a serviette after
dinner, have nothing left to do but to set their country ablaze, blow
their own brains out, plot for a republic or clamor for a war----"
"And you would have read your breviary through every day."
"Yes."
"Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion
of modern society, and has even gone a little further."
Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their De Viris
illustribus for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.
"And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
Raphael. Ah! yes," he went on, "and I hope we are going to come off
conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else's head."
Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish
had been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and
gold. Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the
slightest details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture,
and the splendid colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare
flowers, set in stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air.
Everything, even the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without
pretension, and there was a certain imaginative charm about it all
which acted like a spell on the mind of a needy man.
"Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck," said
Emile, who overheard him. "Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you
as soon as you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out
above the rest of us. Hasn't the artist always kept the balance true
between the poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn't
struggle a necessity to some of us? Look out for your digestion, and
only look," he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, "at the majestic,
thrice holy, and edifying appearance of this amiable capitalist's
dining-room. That man has in reality only made his money for our
benefit. Isn't he a kind of sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by
naturalists, which should be carefully squeezed before he is left for
his heirs to feed upon? There is style, isn't there, about those bas-
reliefs that adorn the walls? And the lustres, and the pictures, what
luxury well carried out! If one may believe those who envy him, or who
know, or think they know, the origins of his life, then this man got
rid of a German and some others--his best friend for one, and the
mother of that friend, during the Revolution. Could you house crimes
under the venerable Taillefer's silvering locks? He looks to me a very
worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and is every glittering
ray like a stab of a dagger to him? . . . Let us go in, one might as
well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here are thirty
men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the flesh
and blood of a whole family; . . . and here are we ourselves, a pair
of youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be
partakers in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he
is a respectable character. . . ."
"No, not now," cried Raphael, "but when he is dead drunk, we shall
have had our dinner then."
The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more
rapid than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid
general effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen
snow, with its symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale
golden rolls of bread. Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of
light reflected by the glass; the lights of the tapers crossed and
recrossed each other indefinitely; the dishes covered with their
silver domes whetted both appetite and curiosity.
While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep
the bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees
from every tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake's
heard, and spoke in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there
gave heed to it, hoping to keep their heads. So the second course
found their minds somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke
while he ate, and drank without heeding the quantity of the liquor,
the wine was so biting, the bouquet so fragrant, the example around so
infectious. Taillefer made a point of stimulating his guests, and
plied them with the formidable wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay,
and heady old Roussillon.
"What is the name of that young man over there?" said the notary,
indicating Raphael. "I thought I heard some one call him Valentin."
"What stuff is this?" said Emile, laughing; "plain Valentin, say you?
Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the
cities of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to
the Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of
Byzantium, it is out of pure condescension, and for lack of funds and
soldiers."
"Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, "there is nothing
more elastic in the world than your Providence."
"Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Convention expended
in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody,
and one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal
inheritance," said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name
had made a Republican.
"Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" asked Moreau (of
the Oise), a substantial farmer. "You, sir, who took blood for wine
just now?"
"Where is the use? Aren't the principles of social order worth some
sacrifices, sir?"
"Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out
his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy,
there are only principles and ideas."
"Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel,
for he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke
of Alva were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an
organization."
"But can't society rid itself of your systems and organizations?" said
Canalis.
"Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out."
"Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation
straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
dangerous than thieves."
"Aren't they a bore with their politics!" said the notary Cardot.
"Shut up. That's enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth
shedding a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation,
we might find her insolvent."
"It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with
evil, rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the
speeches made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one
of Perrault's tales or Charlet's sketches."
"Oh! oh!" cried Cursy, the vaudevilliste; "in that case, gentlemen,
here's to Charles X., the father of liberty."
"Why not?" asked Emile. "When law becomes despotic, morals are
relaxed, and vice versa.
"Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep. Does
not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
nobodies it is their own well-being?"
"The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror."
"All very fine!" said Cardot; "but if there were no property, there
would be no documents to draw up."
"And the cure was found dead in his bed in the morning. . . ."
"No question."
"Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and
abstemious."
"Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious,
political, or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the
edge of an abyss."
"Or Canalis?"
"For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
member of it?" asked the Saint-Simonian.
"If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think
much about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for
the race, go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation
all ready to Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but
here every one fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a
porter, and a blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to
promote them to those positions."
"And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for
the human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so
amusing. Is it nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of
thirty million leagues from the sun?"
"Let us once more take a broad view of civilization," said the man of
learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened
a discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. "The vigor
of a nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude;
then as aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition
of the primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in
remote ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both
sword and censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff
and the king. To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has
distributed power according to the number of combinations, and we come
to the forces called business, thought, money, and eloquence.
Authority thus divided is steadily approaching a social dissolution,
with interest as its one opposing barrier. We depend no longer on
either religion or physical force, but upon intellect. Can a book
replace the sword? Can discussion be a substitute for action? That is
the question."
"Won't you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of
all sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the
existence of God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like
an old Sultan worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of
crime and its emotions in a final despair of poetry."
"Don't you know," replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, "that a
dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the
scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?"
"Can any one treat of virtue thus?" cried Cursy. "Virtue, the subject
of every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the
foundation of every court of law. . . ."
"Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,"
said Bixiou.
"Some drink!"
"What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a
flash, at one pull?"
"Wretch!" Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, "how can you slander
civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite
dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and
do not carp at your mother. . ."
"No."
"I say," the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
"The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, 'twas a
work written 'down to Charenton.' "
"Oh! oh!"
"Ah! ah!"
"Would it not have been nice," the critic said to his neighbor, "to
fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?"
"Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale," said
Bixiou.
"Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God
is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God,
as says St. Paul . . . the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but
isn't the movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the
egg from the fowl? . . . Just hand me some duck . . . and there, you
have all science."
"What fact?"
"Professors' chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for
the professors' chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the
budget."
"Thieves!"
"Nincompoops!"
"Knaves!"
"Gulls!"
"Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
thought?" cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.
"Silence."
"Pay attention."
"Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet."
The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow
gloves, and began to burlesque the Revue des Deux Mondes by acting a
squinting old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard
a word of the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the
century, he represented the Revue at any rate, for his own intentions
were not very clear to him.
The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of
this arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal,
were lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this
almost Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or
crossed the delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the
wines acted like potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind
of mirage in the brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The
clamor increased. Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in
pieces, senseless peals of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a
horn and struck up a flourish on it. It acted like a signal given by
the devil. Yells, hisses, songs, cries, and groans went up from the
maddened crew. You might have smiled to see men, light-hearted by
nature, grow tragical as Crebillon's dramas, and pensive as a sailor
in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed secrets to the inquisitive, who
were long past heeding them. Saturnine faces were wreathed in smiles
worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude Vignon shuffled about like a
bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to fight.
"Don't look!" Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. "Who knows? Suspense is
so pleasant."
"We owe our arts and monuments to the Pater noster, and our knowledge,
too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby
a vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five
hundred intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play
to CIVILIZATION, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient
terrible figure of the KING, that sham Providence, reared by man
between himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism
seems like a barren skeleton. What do you say?"
And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid
gas, perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.
There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering
by this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of
intelligence is quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny,
gives itself up to the frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived
at the apogee of intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried
to arrest a single thought which might assure them of their own
existence; others, deep in the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied
the possibility of movement. The noisy and the silent were oddly
assorted.
For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian
tones of the servant, who spoke on his master's behalf, they all rose,
leaning upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold
of the room the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if
fascinated. The intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade
away at this titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to
appeal to the most sensual of their instincts.
Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied
with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of
beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a
bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at
the misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of
the truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a
cruel tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of
them, and they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and
pleasures atoned for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the
guests, and conversations began, as varied in character as the
speakers. They broke up into groups. It might have been a fashionable
drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the
assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are
struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little while
laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The
saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself.
The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance to a
symphony of Beethoven's.
But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something
terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the
demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after
another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face.
She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared
her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a
Greek temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen
anear. And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have
stimulated exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances
might put life into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was
vaguely reminded of one of Shakespeare's tragedies--a wonderful maze,
in which joy groans, and there is something wild even about love, and
the magic of forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel
storms of rage. She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh
like a devil, or weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one
instant all a woman's powers of attraction in a single effort (the
sighs of melancholy and the charms of maiden's shyness alone
excepted), then in a moment rise in fury like a nation in revolt, and
tear herself, her passion, and her lover, in pieces.
Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two
friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief
against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her
corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of
enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations
of three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry
over a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old
men into boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only
possible to giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or
for whom strife has become a plaything.
"Aquilina."
"Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
conspirator, who would die for you?" cried Emile eagerly--this gleam
of poetry had aroused his interest.
"Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads of
La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That's enough,
Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other,
though not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you
have done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench
at the back of Clamart than in a rival's arms."
All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by
the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that
a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come up
noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure,
charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue
among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been
shyer, whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about
sixteen years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and
fresh from some church in which she must have prayed the angels to
call her to heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as
this to be found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask,
and the most artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an
opening flower.
"I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
"if you ever reflect upon your future?"
"How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
avert it?"
"Aquilina mia, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing
fit of yours," Euphrasia remarked. "Yes, cashmere, point d'Alencon,
perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything
pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly,
but good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me," she went on,
with a malicious glance at the friends; "but am I not right? I would
sooner die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a
mania for perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature,
such as God has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them;
I should not keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be
charming and have power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat.
Society sanctions my life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why
does Providence pay me every morning my income, which I spend every
evening? Why are hospitals built for us? And Providence did not put
good and evil on either hand for us to select what tires and pains us.
I should be very foolish if I did not amuse myself."
"Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing
at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the
slightest uneasiness."
"What have you suffered to make you think like this?" asked Raphael.
"I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance," she said, striking
an attitude that displayed all her charms; "and yet I had worked night
and day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow,
and I have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life."
"But does not happiness come from the soul within?" cried Raphael.
"Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
poor things be without it?"
"Hush, be quiet," Emile broke in. "Don't talk about something you have
never known."
"That I have never known!" Euphrasia answered. "You give yourself for
life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, 'Thank you!'
for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and add
to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep
one's freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"
"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"
"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice.
"She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial
with untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor
tried to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king,
her divinity. . . . Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."
"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
men in horror."
"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
sarcastic Aquilina.
"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.
"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
way," Raphael exclaimed.
"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life
of pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart. . . ."
"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.
"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I
must admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was
about to throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no
doubt, my motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an
almost miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material
world had but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical
interpretation of human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of
all the intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in
these two women, the living and authentic types of folly, would you be
any the wiser? Our profound apathy towards men and things supplied the
half-tones in a crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so
diametrically opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch
a gleam of philosophy in this."
"And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose
heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
to burst," replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement
of winding and unwinding Euphrasia's hair, "you would be ashamed of
your inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a
phrase, and reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living
brings a stupid kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence
with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the
abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of
wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up in brief; we may
extinguish emotion, and so live to old age, or we may choose to die
young as martyrs to contending passions. And yet this decree is at
variance with the temperaments with which we were endowed by the
bitter jester who modeled all creatures."
"Pooh," said Emile; "I did not think you could be so commonplace; that
remark is hackneyed. Don't you know that every one of us claims to
have suffered as no other ever did?"
"What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some
disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with
Damiens once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a
garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, 'I
am hungry'? Have you sold your mistress' hair to hazard the money at
play? Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious
uncle at a sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to
take it up? Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown
yourself for some woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer
dulness, I disown you. Make your confession, and no lies! I don't at
all want a historical memoir. And, above all things, be as concise as
your clouded intellect permits; I am as critical as a professor, and
as sleepy as a woman at her vespers."
"You silly fool!" said Raphael. "When has not suffering been keener
for a more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a
pitch that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when
they are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families;
into crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,--
then, my dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as
tender and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises
that some stony hearts do not even feel----"
"For pity's sake, spare me thy exordium," said Emile, as, half
plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael's hand.
II
"Very likely," said Raphael submissively. "I spare you the first
seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a listener's patience.
Till that time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life
at school or the lycee, with its imaginary troubles and genuine
happinesses, which are so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded
palates still crave for that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried
it afresh. It was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so
contemptible, but which taught us application for all that. . . ."
"When I left school," Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the
right of speaking, "my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he
installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five
in the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my
law studies seriously. I attended the Schools, and read with an
advocate as well, but my lectures and work were so narrowly
circumscribed by the laws of time and space, and my father required
such a strict account of my doings, at dinner, that . . ."
"I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my
father's money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred
crowns! The joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the
amount; joys that flitted about me like Macbeth's witches round their
caldron; joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a
deliberate rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent
beating of my heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem
to see yet. The dates had been erased, and Bonaparte's head simpered
upon them. After I had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to
the gaming-table with the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp
hands, prowling about the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of
chickens. Tormented by inexpressible terror, I flung a sudden
clairvoyant glance round me, and feeling quite sure that I was seen by
none of my acquaintance, betted on a stout, jovial little man, heaping
upon his head more prayers and vows than are put up during two or
three storms at sea. Then, with an intuitive scoundrelism, or
Machiavelism, surprising in one of my age, I went and stood in the
door, and looked about me in the rooms, though I saw nothing; for both
mind and eyes hovered about that fateful green cloth.
"My father suddenly went by, and then I knew what the Scripture meant
by 'The Spirit of God passed before his face.' I had won. I slipped
through the crowd of men who had gathered about the players with the
quickness of an eel escaping through a broken mesh in a net. My nerves
thrilled with joy instead of anguish. I felt like some criminal on the
way to torture released by a chance meeting with the king. It happened
that a man with a decoration found himself short by forty francs.
Uneasy eyes suspected me; I turned pale, and drops of perspiration
stood on my forehead, I was well punished, I thought, for having
robbed my father. Then the kind little stout man said, in a voice like
an angel's surely, 'All these gentlemen have paid their stakes,' and
put down the forty francs himself. I raised my head in triumph upon
the players. After I had returned the money I had taken from it to my
father's purse, I left my winnings with that honest and worthy
gentleman, who continued to win. As soon as I found myself possessed
of a hundred and sixty francs, I wrapped them up in my handkerchief,
so that they could neither move or rattle on the way back; and I
played no more.
" 'But it would have been nothing out of the common if you had been
prompted by self-love to put some money down on the table. In the eyes
of men of the world you are quite old enough to assume the right to
commit such follies. So I should have pardoned you, Raphael, if you
had made use of my purse. . . . .'
"I did not answer. When we reached home, I returned the keys and money
to my father. As he entered his study, he emptied out his purse on the
mantelpiece, counted the money, and turned to me with a kindly look,
saying with more or less long and significant pauses between each
phrase:
" 'My boy, you are very nearly twenty now. I am satisfied with you.
You ought to have an allowance, if only to teach you how to lay it
out, and to gain some acquaintance with everyday business.
Henceforward I shall let you have a hundred francs each month. Here is
your first quarter's income for this year,' he added, fingering a pile
of gold, as if to make sure that the amount was correct. 'Do what you
please with it.'
"I confess that I was ready to fling myself at his feet, to tell him
that I was a thief, a scoundrel, and, worse than all, a liar! But a
feeling of shame held me back. I went up to him for an embrace, but he
gently pushed me away.
" 'You are a man now, MY CHILD,' he said. 'What I have just done was a
very proper and simple thing, for which there is no need to thank me.
If I have any claim to your gratitude, Raphael,' he went on, in a kind
but dignified way, 'it is because I have preserved your youth from the
evils that destroy young men in Paris. We will be two friends
henceforth. In a year's time you will be a doctor of law. Not without
some hardship and privations you have acquired the sound knowledge and
the love of, and application to, work that is indispensable to public
men. You must learn to know me, Raphael. I do not want to make either
an advocate or a notary of you, but a statesman, who shall be the
pride of our poor house. . . . Good-night,' he added.
"From that day my father took me fully into confidence. I was an only
son; and ten years before, I had lost my mother. In time past my
father, the head of a historic family remembered even now in Auvergne,
had come to Paris to fight against his evil star, dissatisfied at the
prospect of tilling the soil, with his useless sword by his side. He
was endowed with the shrewdness that gives the men of the south of
France a certain ascendency when energy goes with it. Almost unaided,
he made a position for himself near the fountain of power. The
revolution brought a reverse of fortune, but he had managed to marry
an heiress of good family, and, in the time of the Empire, appeared to
be on the point of restoring to our house its ancient splendor.
"While we are young, and before the world has rubbed off the delicate
bloom from our sentiments, the freshness of our impressions, the noble
purity of conscience which will never allow us to palter with evil,
the sense of duty is very strong within us, the voice of honor clamors
within us, and we are open and straightforward. At that time I was all
these things. I wished to justify my father's confidence in me. But
lately I would have stolen a paltry sum from him, with secret delight;
but now that I shared the burden of his affairs, of his name and of
his house, I would secretly have given up my fortune and my hopes for
him, as I was sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the
sacrifice! So when M. de Villele exhumed, for our special benefit, an
imperial decree concerning forfeitures, and had ruined us, I
authorized the sale of my property, only retaining an island in the
middle of the Loire where my mother was buried. Perhaps arguments and
evasions, philosophical, philanthropic, and political considerations
would not fail me now, to hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor
termed a 'folly'; but at one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow
with generosity and affection. The tears that stood in my father's
eyes were to me the most splendid of fortunes, and the thought of
those tears has often soothed my sorrow. Ten months after he had paid
his creditors, my father died of grief; I was his idol, and he had
ruined me! The thought killed him. Towards the end of the autumn of
1826, at the age of twenty-two, I was the sole mourner at his
graveside--the grave of my father and my earliest friend. Not many
young men have found themselves alone with their thoughts as they
followed a hearse, or have seen themselves lost in crowded Paris, and
without money or prospects. Orphans rescued by public charity have at
any rate the future of the battlefield before them, and find a shelter
in some institution and a father in the government or in the procureur
du roi. I had nothing.
" 'Oh, rococo, all of it!' said the auctioneer. A terrible word that
fell like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and
dispelled my earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune
was comprised in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a linen bag
with eleven hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood
before me in the person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept his hat on
while he spoke. Jonathan, an old servant who was much attached to me,
and whom my mother had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four
hundred francs, spoke to me as I was leaving the house that I had so
often gaily left for a drive in my childhood.
"Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
position," said Raphael after a pause. "Family ties, weak ones, it is
true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have
kept me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut
their doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were
very influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I
found neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed
in my affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by
nature, I must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's
discipline had destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and
awkward; I could not believe that my opinion carried any weight
whatever; I took no pleasure in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was
ashamed to meet my own eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be
the stay of a man with anything in him, in all his struggles, the
voice that cries, 'Courage! Go forward!' in spite of sudden
revelations of my own strength in my solitude; in spite of the hopes
that thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public admired so
much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain,--in spite of all
this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.
"An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant
for great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of
other men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the
world, where I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.
Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which these words
were spoken, that he began to pay close attention to Raphael, whom he
watched with a bewildered expression.
"Now," continued the speaker, "all these things that befell me appear
in a new light. The sequence of events that I once thought so
unfortunate created the splendid powers of which, later, I became so
proud. If I may believe you, I possess the power of readily expressing
my thoughts, and I could take a forward place in the great field of
knowledge; and is not this the result of scientific curiosity, of
excessive application, and a love of reading which possessed me from
the age of seven till my entry on life? The very neglect in which I
was left, and the consequent habits of self-repression and self-
concentration; did not these things teach me how to consider and
reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in obedience to the exactions of
the world, which humble the proudest soul and reduce it to a mere
husk; and was it not this very fact that refined the emotional part of
my nature till it became the perfected instrument of a loftier purpose
than passionate desires? I remember watching the women who mistook me
with all the insight of contemned love.
"I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to
them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in
the same hour's space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and
thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise
than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for
impudence? They found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor,
weakness. I was held to be listless and incapable of love or of steady
purpose; a too active imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt
the cause. My silence was idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by
my efforts to please, women one and all have condemned me. With tears
and mortification, I bowed before the decision of the world; but my
distress was not barren. I determined to revenge myself on society; I
would dominate the feminine intellect, and so have the feminine soul
at my mercy; all eyes should be fixed upon me, when the servant at the
door announced my name. I had determined from my childhood that I
would be a great man; I said with Andre Chenier, as I struck my
forehead, 'There is something underneath that!' I felt, I believed,
the thought within me that I must express, the system I must
establish, the knowledge I must interpret.
"In this way, dear Emile, I ran the risk of remaining companionless
for good. The incomprehensible bent of women's minds appears to lead
them to see nothing but the weak points in a clever man, and the
strong points of a fool. They feel the liveliest sympathy with the
fool's good qualities, which perpetually flatter their own defects;
while they find the man of talent hardly agreeable enough to
compensate for his shortcomings. All capacity is a sort of
intermittent fever, and no woman is anxious to share in its
discomforts only; they look to find in their lovers the wherewithal to
gratify their own vanity. It is themselves that they love in us! But
the artist, poor and proud, along with his endowment of creative
power, is furnished with an aggressive egotism! Everything about him
is involved in I know not what whirlpool of his ideas, and even his
mistress must gyrate along with them. How is a woman, spoilt with
praise, to believe in the love of a man like that? Will she go to seek
him out? That sort of lover has not the leisure to sit beside a sofa
and give himself up to the sentimental simperings that women are so
fond of, and on which the false and unfeeling pride themselves. He
cannot spare the time from his work, and how can he afford to humble
himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready to give my life once and
for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. Besides, there is
something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker's tactics, who runs on
errands for some insipid affected woman; all this disgusts an artist.
Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty; he has
need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend their
lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into clothes-pegs to
hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is not theirs to
give; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling and not of obeying.
She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow
wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and
happiness are centered. Ambitious men need those Oriental women whose
whole thought is given to the study of their requirements; for
unhappiness means for them the incompatibility of their means with
their desires. But I, who took myself for a man of genius, must needs
feel attracted by these very she-coxcombs. So, as I cherished ideas so
different from those generally received; as I wished to scale the
heavens without a ladder, was possessed of wealth that could not
circulate, and of knowledge so wide and so imperfectly arranged and
digested that it overtaxed my memory; as I had neither relations nor
friends in the midst of this lonely and ghastly desert, a desert of
paving stones, full of animation, life, and thought, wherein every one
is worse than inimical, indifferent to wit; I made a very natural if
foolish resolve, which required such unknown impossibilities, that my
spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager with myself, for I was
at once the player and the cards.
"This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep life in me for
three years--the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a
work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a
fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like a
hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and
ideas, and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a
sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to
await a brilliant and splendid new birth. I imperiled my life in order
to live. By reducing my requirements to real needs and the barest
necessaries, I found that three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed
for a year of penury; and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender
sum, so long as I submitted to my own claustral discipline."
"I lived for nearly three years in that way," Raphael answered, with a
kind of pride. "Let us reckon it out. Three sous for bread, two for
milk, and three for cold meat, kept me from dying of hunger, and my
mind in a state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know,
the wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My
lodgings cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at
night; I did my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce
the laundress' bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in
coal, if divided up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had
three years' supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to
some library or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only
amounted to eighteen sous, so two were left over for emergencies. I
cannot recollect, during that long period of toil, either crossing the
Pont des Arts, or paying for water; I went out to fetch it every
morning from the fountain in the Place Saint Michel, at the corner of
the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my poverty proudly. A man urged on towards
a fair future walks through life like an innocent person to his death;
he feels no shame about it.
"I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the hospital
without terror. I had not a moment's doubt of my health, and besides,
the poor can only take to their beds to die. I cut my own hair till
the day when an angel of love and kindness . . . But I do not want to
anticipate the state of things that I shall reach later. You must
simply know that I lived with one grand thought for a mistress, a
dream, an illusion which deceives us all more or less at first. To-day
I laugh at myself, at that self, holy perhaps and heroic, which is now
no more. I have since had a closer view of society and the world, of
our manners and customs, and seen the dangers of my innocent credulity
and the superfluous nature of my fervent toil. Stores of that sort are
quite useless to aspirants for fame. Light should be the baggage of
seekers after fortune!
"Sudden descents into the world from the divine height of scientific
meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended
perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to
carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most
out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the
Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l'Estrapade, I saw a girl of
fourteen playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny,
her winsome ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not
yet over; it was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting before
their doors as if it were a fete-day in some country town. At first I
watched the charming expression of the girl's face and her graceful
attitudes, her pose fit for a painter. It was a pretty sight. I looked
about me, seeking to understand this blithe simplicity in the midst of
Paris, and saw that the street was a blind alley and but little
frequented. I remembered that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and
looked up the Hotel Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition awakened
hopes of a cheap lodging, and I determined to enter.
"I found myself in a room with a low ceiling; the candles, in classic-
looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key. The
predominating cleanliness of the room made a striking contrast to the
usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre;
there was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking
pots and furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She
seemed to be about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces
on her features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially
mentioned the amount I could pay; it seemed to cause her no surprise;
she sought out a key from the row, went up to the attics with me, and
showed me a room that looked out on the neighboring roofs and courts;
long poles with linen drying on them hung out of the window.
"Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with
its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a
steep slope, and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles.
There was room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the
highest point of the roof my piano could stand. Not being rich enough
to furnish this cage (that might have been one of the Piombi of
Venice), the poor woman had never been able to let it; and as I had
saved from the recent sale the furniture that was in a fashion
peculiarly mine, I very soon came to terms with my landlady, and moved
in on the following day.
"No earthly pleasure can compare with the divine delight of watching
the dawn of an idea in the space of abstractions as it rises like the
morning sun; an idea that, better still, attains gradually like a
child to puberty and man's estate. Study lends a kind of enchantment
to all our surroundings. The wretched desk covered with brown leather
at which I wrote, my piano, bed, and armchair, the odd wall-paper and
furniture seemed to have for me a kind of life in them, and to be
humble friends of mine and mute partakers of my destiny. How often
have I confided my soul to them in a glance! A warped bit of beading
often met my eyes, and suggested new developments,--a striking proof
of my system, or a felicitous word by which to render my all but
inexpressible thought. By sheer contemplation of the things about me I
discerned an expression and a character in each. If the setting sun
happened to steal in through my narrow window, they would take new
colors, fade or shine, grow dull or gay, and always amaze me with some
new effect. These trifling incidents of a solitary life, which escape
those preoccupied with outward affairs, make the solace of prisoners.
And what was I but the captive of an idea, imprisoned in my system,
but sustained also by the prospect of a brilliant future? At each
obstacle that I overcame, I seemed to kiss the soft hands of a woman
with a fair face, a wealthy, well-dressed woman, who should some day
say softly, while she caressed my hair:
"I had undertaken two great works--one a comedy that in a very short
time must bring me wealth and fame, and an entry into those circles
whither I wished to return, to exercise the royal privileges of a man
of genius. You all saw nothing in that masterpiece but the blunder of
a young man fresh from college, a babyish fiasco. Your jokes clipped
the wings of a throng of illusions, which have never stirred since
within me. You, dear Emile, alone brought soothing to the deep wounds
that others had made in my heart. You alone will admire my 'Theory of
the Will.' I devoted most of my time to that long work, for which I
studied Oriental languages, physiology and anatomy. If I do not
deceive myself, my labors will complete the task begun by Mesmer,
Lavater, Gall, and Bichat, and open up new paths in science.
"There ends that fair life of mine, the daily sacrifice, the
unrecognized silkworm's toil, that is, perhaps, its own sole
recompense. Since attaining years of discretion, until the day when I
finished my 'Theory,' I observed, learned, wrote, and read
unintermittingly; my life was one long imposition, as schoolboys say.
Though by nature effeminately attached to Oriental indolence, sensual
in tastes, and a wooer of dreams, I worked incessantly, and refused to
taste any of the enjoyments of Parisian life. Though a glutton, I
became abstemious; and loving exercise and sea voyages as I did, and
haunted by the wish to visit many countries, still child enough to
play at ducks and drakes with pebbles over a pond, I led a sedentary
life with a pen in my fingers. I liked talking, but I went to sit and
mutely listen to professors who gave public lectures at the
Bibliotheque or the Museum. I slept upon my solitary pallet like a
Benedictine brother, though woman was my one chimera, a chimera that
fled from me as I wooed it! In short, my life has been a cruel
contradiction, a perpetual cheat. After that, judge a man!
"During the first ten months of seclusion I led the life of poverty
and solitude that I have described to you; I used to steal out
unobserved every morning to buy my own provisions for the day; I
tidied my room; I was at once master and servant, and played the
Diogenes with incredible spirit. But afterwards, while my hostess and
her daughter watched my ways and behavior, scrutinized my appearance
and divined my poverty, there could not but be some bonds between us;
perhaps because they were themselves so very poor. Pauline, the
charming child, whose latent and unconscious grace had, in a manner,
brought me there, did me many services that I could not well refuse.
All women fallen on evil days are sisters; they speak a common
language; they have the same generosity--the generosity that possesses
nothing, and so is lavish of its affection, of its time, and of its
very self.
"One evening Pauline told me her story with touching simplicity. Her
father had been a major in the horse grenadiers of the Imperial Guard.
He had been taken prisoner by the Cossacks, at the passage of
Beresina; and when Napoleon later on proposed an exchange, the Russian
authorities made search for him in Siberia in vain; he had escaped
with a view of reaching India, and since then Mme. Gaudin, my
landlady, could hear no news of her husband. Then came the disasters
of 1814 and 1815; and, left alone and without resource, she had
decided to let furnished lodgings in order to keep herself and her
daughter.
"She always hoped to see her husband again. Her greatest trouble was
about her daughter's education; the Princess Borghese was her
Pauline's godmother; and Pauline must not be unworthy of the fair
future promised by her imperial protectress. When Mme. Gaudin confided
to me this heavy trouble that preyed upon her, she said, with sharp
pain in her voice, 'I would give up the property and the scrap of
paper that makes Gaudin a baron of the empire, and all our rights to
the endowment of Wistchnau, if only Pauline could be brought up at
Saint-Denis?' Her words struck me; now I could show my gratitude for
the kindnesses expended on me by the two women; all at once the idea
of offering to finish Pauline's education occurred to me; and the
offer was made and accepted in the most perfect simplicity. In this
way I came to have some hours of recreation. Pauline had natural
aptitude; she learned so quickly, that she soon surpassed me at the
piano. As she became accustomed to think aloud in my presence, she
unfolded all the sweet refinements of a heart that was opening itself
out to life, as some flower-cup opens slowly to the sun. She listened
to me, pleased and thoughtful, letting her dark velvet eyes rest upon
me with a half smile in them; she repeated her lessons in soft and
gentle tones, and showed childish glee when I was satisfied with her.
Her mother grew more and more anxious every day to shield the young
girl from every danger (for all the beauty promised in early life was
developing in the crescent moon), and was glad to see her spend whole
days indoors in study. My piano was the only one she could use, and
while I was out she practised on it. When I came home, Pauline would
be in my room, in her shabby dress, but her slightest movement
revealed her slender figure in its attractive grace, in spite of the
coarse materials that she wore. As with the heroine of the fable of
'Peau-d'Ane,' a dainty foot peeped out of the clumsy shoes. But all
her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I had laid commands
upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. I dreaded lest I should
betray her mother's faith in me. I admired the lovely girl as if she
had been a picture, or as the portrait of a dead mistress; she was at
once my child and my statue. For me, another Pygmalion, the maiden
with the hues of life and the living voice was to become a form of
inanimate marble. I was very strict with her, but the more I made her
feel my pedagogue's severity, the more gentle and submissive she grew.
"Ah, vive l'amour! But let it be in silk and cashmere, surrounded with
the luxury which so marvelously embellishes it; for is it not perhaps
itself a luxury? I enjoy making havoc with an elaborate erection of
scented hair; I like to crush flowers, to disarrange and crease a
smart toilette at will. A bizarre attraction lies for me in burning
eyes that blaze through a lace veil, like flame through cannon smoke.
My way of love would be to mount by a silken ladder, in the silence of
a winter night. And what bliss to reach, all powdered with snow, a
perfumed room, with hangings of painted silk, to find a woman there,
who likewise shakes away the snow from her; for what other name can be
found for the white muslin wrappings that vaguely define her, like
some angel form issuing from a cloud! And then I wish for furtive
joys, for the security of audacity. I want to see once more that woman
of mystery, but let it be in the throng, dazzling, unapproachable,
adored on all sides, dressed in laces and ablaze with diamonds, laying
her commands upon every one; so exalted above us, that she inspires
awe, and none dares to pay his homage to her.
"She gives me a stolen glance, amid her court, a look that exposes the
unreality of all this; that resigns for me the world and all men in
it! Truly I have scorned myself for a passion for a few yards of lace,
velvet, and fine lawn, and the hairdresser's feats of skill; a love of
wax-lights, a carriage and a title, a heraldic coronet painted on
window panes, or engraved by a jeweler; in short, a liking for all
that is adventitious and least woman in woman. I have scorned and
reasoned with myself, but all in vain.
"A woman of rank with her subtle smile, her high-born air, and self-
esteem captivates me. The barriers she erects between herself and the
world awaken my vanity, a good half of love. There would be more
relish for me in bliss that all others envied. If my mistress does
nothing that other women do, and neither lives nor conducts herself
like them, wears a cloak that they cannot attain, breathes a perfume
of her own, then she seems to rise far above me. The further she rises
from earth, even in the earthlier aspects of love, the fairer she
becomes for me.
"Luckily for me we have had no queen in France these twenty years, for
I should have fallen in love with her. A woman must be wealthy to
acquire the manners of a princess. What place had Pauline among these
far-fetched imaginings? Could she bring me the love that is death,
that brings every faculty into play, the nights that are paid for by
life? We hardly die, I think, for an insignificant girl who gives
herself to us; and I could never extinguish these feelings and poet's
dreams within me. I was born for an inaccessible love, and fortune has
overtopped my desire.
"How often have I set satin shoes on Pauline's tiny feet, confined her
form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of gauze, and thrown a
loose scarf about her as I saw her tread the carpets in her mansion
and led her out to her splendid carriage! In such guise I should have
adored her. I endowed her with all the pride she lacked, stripped her
of her virtues, her natural simple charm, and frank smile, in order to
plunge her heart in our Styx of depravity that makes invulnerable,
load her with our crimes, make of her the fantastical doll of our
drawing-rooms, the frail being who lies about in the morning and comes
to life again at night with the dawn of tapers. Pauline was fresh-
hearted and affectionate--I would have had her cold and formal.
"In the last days of my frantic folly, memory brought Pauline before
me, as it brings the scenes of our childhood, and made me pause to
muse over past delicious moments that softened my heart. I sometimes
saw her, the adorable girl who sat quietly sewing at my table, wrapped
in her meditations; the faint light from my window fell upon her and
was reflected back in silvery rays from her thick black hair;
sometimes I heard her young laughter, or the rich tones of her voice
singing some canzonet that she composed without effort. And often my
Pauline seemed to grow greater, as music flowed from her, and her face
bore a striking resemblance to the noble one that Carlo Dolci chose
for the type of Italy. My cruel memory brought her back athwart the
dissipations of my existence, like a remorse, or a symbol of purity.
But let us leave the poor child to her own fate. Whatever her troubles
may have been, at any rate I protected her from a menacing tempest--I
did not drag her down into my hell.
"Until last winter I led the uneventful studious life of which I have
given you some faint picture. In the earliest days of December 1829, I
came across Rastignac, who, in spite of the shabby condition of my
wardrobe, linked his arm in mine, and inquired into my affairs with a
quite brotherly interest. Caught by his engaging manner, I gave him a
brief account of my life and hopes; he began to laugh, and treated me
as a mixture of a man of genius and a fool. His Gascon accent and
knowledge of the world, the easy life his clever management procured
for him, all produced an irresistible effect upon me. I should die an
unrecognized failure in a hospital, Rastignac said, and be buried in a
pauper's grave. He talked of charlatanism. Every man of genius was a
charlatan, he plainly showed me in that pleasant way of his that makes
him so fascinating. He insisted that I must be out of my senses, and
would be my own death, if I lived on alone in the Rue des Cordiers.
According to him, I ought to go into society, to accustom people to
the sound of my name, and to rid myself of the simple title of
'monsieur' which sits but ill on a great man in his lifetime.
" 'Those who know no better,' he cried, 'call this sort of business
SCHEMING, and moral people condemn it for a "dissipated life." We need
not stop to look at what people think, but see the results. You work,
you say? Very good, but nothing will ever come of that. Now, I am
ready for anything and fit for nothing. As lazy as a lobster? Very
likely, but I succeed everywhere. I go out into society, I push myself
forward, the others make way before me; I brag and am believed; I
incur debts which somebody else pays! Dissipation, dear boy, is a
methodical policy. The life of a man who deliberately runs through his
fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his
pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital. Suppose a
merchant runs a risk of a million, for twenty years he can neither
sleep, eat, nor amuse himself, he is brooding over his million, it
makes him run about all over Europe; he worries himself, goes to the
devil in every way that man has invented. Then comes a liquidation,
such as I have seen myself, which very often leaves him penniless and
without a reputation or a friend. The spendthrift, on the other hand,
takes life as a serious game and sees his horses run. He loses his
capital, perhaps, but he stands a chance of being nominated Receiver-
General, of making a wealthy marriage, or of an appointment of attache
to a minister or ambassador; and he has his friends left and his name,
and he never wants money. He knows the standing of everybody, and uses
every one for his own benefit. Is this logical, or am I a madman after
all? Haven't you there all the moral of the comedy that goes on every
day in this world? . . . Your work is completed' he went on after a
pause; 'you are immensely clever! Well, you have only arrived at my
starting-point. Now, you had better look after its success yourself;
it is the surest way. You will make allies in every clique, and secure
applause beforehand. I mean to go halves in your glory myself; I shall
be the jeweler who set the diamonds in your crown. Come here to-morrow
evening, by way of a beginning. I will introduce you to a house where
all Paris goes, all OUR Paris, that is--the Paris of exquisites,
millionaires, celebrities, all the folk who talk gold like Chrysostom.
When they have taken up a book, that book becomes the fashion; and
if it is something really good for once, they will have declared it
to be a work of genius without knowing it. If you have any sense, my
dear fellow, you will ensure the success of your "Theory," by a
better understanding of the theory of success. To-morrow evening you
shall go to see that queen of the moment--the beautiful Countess
Foedora. . . .'
"He swung round on his heel and made off without waiting for my
answer. It never occurred to him that a reasoning being could refuse
an introduction to Foedora. How can the fascination of a name be
explained? FOEDORA haunted me like some evil thought, with which you
seek to come to terms. A voice said in me, 'You are going to see
Foedora!' In vain I reasoned with that voice, saying that it lied to
me; all my arguments were defeated by the name 'Foedora.' Was not the
name, and even the woman herself, the symbol of all my desires, and
the object of my life?
"The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I borrowed a
novel, and spent the whole day over it, so that I could not possibly
think nor keep account of the time till night. Foedora's name echoed
through me even as I read, but only as a distant sound; though it
could be heard, it was not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly
creditable black coat and a white waistcoat; of all my fortune there
now remained abut thirty francs, which I had distributed about among
my clothes and in my drawers, so as to erect between my whims and the
spending of a five-franc piece a thorny barrier of search, and an
adventurous peregrination round my room. While I as dressing, I dived
about for my money in an ocean of papers. This scarcity of specie will
give you some idea of the value of that squandered upon gloves and
cab-hire; a month's bread disappeared at one fell swoop. Alas! money
is always forthcoming for our caprices; we only grudge the cost of
things that are useful or necessary. We recklessly fling gold to an
opera-dancer, and haggle with a tradesman whose hungry family must
wait for the settlement of our bill. How many men are there that wear
a coat that cost a hundred francs, and carry a diamond in the head of
their cane, and dine for twenty-five SOUS for all that! It seems as
though we could never pay enough for the pleasures of vanity.
" 'You know I am pledged,' he said, 'and what I should lose, too, if I
tried a change in love. So my observation of Foedora has been quite
cool and disinterested, and my remarks must have some truth in them. I
was looking to your future when I thought of introducing you to her;
so mind very carefully what I am about to say. She has a terrible
memory. She is clever enough to drive a diplomatist wild; she would
know it at once if he spoke the truth. Between ourselves, I fancy that
her marriage was not recognized by the Emperor, for the Russian
ambassador began to smile when I spoke of her; he does not receive her
either, and only bows very coolly if he meets her in the Bois. For all
that, she is in Madame de Serizy's set, and visits Mesdames de
Nucingen and de Restaud. There is no cloud over her here in France;
the Duchesse de Carigliano, the most-strait-laced marechale in the
whole Bonapartist coterie, often goes to spend the summer with her at
her country house. Plenty of young fops, sons of peers of France, have
offered her a title in exchange for her fortune, and she has politely
declined them all. Her susceptibilities, maybe, are not to be touched
by anything less than a count. Aren't you a marquis? Go ahead if you
fancy her. This is what you may call receiving your instructions.'
"His raillery made me think that Rastignac wished to joke and excite
my curiosity, so that I was in a paroxysm of my extemporized passion
by the time that we stopped before a peristyle full of flowers. My
heart beat and my color rose as we went up the great carpeted
staircase, and I noticed about me all the studied refinements of
English comfort; I was infatuatedly bourgeois; I forgot my origin and
all my personal and family pride. Alas! I had but just left a garret,
after three years of poverty, and I could not just then set the
treasures there acquired above such trifles as these. Nor could I
rightly estimate the worth of the vast intellectual capital which
turns to riches at the moment when opportunity comes within our reach,
opportunity that does not overwhelm, because study has prepared us for
the struggles of public life.
"I found a woman of about twenty-two years of age; she was of average
height, was dressed in white, and held a feather fire-screen in her
hand; a group of men stood around her. She rose at the sight of
Rastignac, and came towards us with a gracious smile and a musically-
uttered compliment, prepared no doubt beforehand, for me. Our friend
had spoken of me as a rising man, and his clever way of making the
most of me had procured me this flattering reception. I was confused
by the attention that every one paid to me; but Rastignac had luckily
mentioned my modesty. I was brought in contact with scholars, men of
letters, ex-ministers, and peers of France. The conversation,
interrupted a while by my coming, was resumed. I took courage, feeling
that I had a reputation to maintain, and without abusing my privilege,
I spoke when it fell to me to speak, trying to state the questions at
issue in words more or less profound, witty or trenchant, and I made a
certain sensation. Rastignac was a prophet for the thousandth time in
his life. As soon as the gathering was large enough to restore freedom
to individuals, he took my arm, and we went round the rooms.
" 'Don't look as if you were too much struck by the princess,' he
said, 'or she will guess your object in coming to visit her.'
" 'The boldest and even the cleverest adventurers among us,
acknowledge themselves defeated, and continue to be her lovers and
devoted friends. Isn't that woman a puzzle?'
"His words seemed to intoxicate me; I had jealous fears already of the
past. I leapt for joy, and hurried back to the countess, whom I had
seen in the gothic boudoir. She stopped me by a smile, made me sit
beside her, and talked about my work, seeming to take the greatest
interest in it, and all the more when I set forth my theories
amusingly, instead of adopting the formal language of a professor for
their explanation. It seemed to divert her to be told that the human
will was a material force like steam; that in the moral world nothing
could resist its power if a man taught himself to concentrate it, to
economize it, and to project continually its fluid mass in given
directions upon other souls. Such a man, I said, could modify all
things relatively to man, even the peremptory laws of nature. The
questions Foedora raised showed a certain keenness of intellect. I
took a pleasure in deciding some of them in her favor, in order to
flatter her; then I confuted her feminine reasoning with a word, and
roused her curiosity by drawing her attention to an everyday matter--
to sleep, a thing so apparently commonplace, that in reality is an
insoluble problem for science. The countess sat in silence for a
moment when I told her that our ideas were complete organic beings,
existing in an invisible world, and influencing our destinies; and for
witnesses I cited the opinions of Descartes, Diderot, and Napoleon,
who had directed, and still directed, all the currents of the age.
"So I had the honor of amusing this woman; who asked me to come to see
her when she left me; giving me les grande entrees, in the language of
the court. Whether it was by dint of substituting polite formulas for
genuine expressions of feeling, a commendable habit of mine, or
because Foedora hailed in me a coming celebrity, an addition to her
learned menagerie; for some reason I thought that I had pleased her. I
called all my previous physiological studies and knowledge of woman to
my aid, and minutely scrutinized this singular person and her ways all
evening. I concealed myself in the embrasure of a window, and sought
to discover her thoughts from her bearing. I studied the tactics of
the mistress of the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted,
beckoned to this one or that, asked questions, listened to the
answers, as she leaned against the frame of the door; I detected a
languid charm in her movements, a grace in the flutterings of her
dress, remarked the nature of the feelings she so powerfully excited,
and became very incredulous as to her virtue. If Foedora would none of
love to-day, she had had strong passions at some time; past experience
of pleasure showed itself in the attitudes she chose in conversation,
in her coquettish way of leaning against the panel behind her; she
seemed scarcely able to stand alone, and yet ready for flight from too
bold a glance. There was a kind of eloquence about her lightly folded
arms, which, even for benevolent eyes, breathed sentiment. Her fresh
red lips sharply contrasted with her brilliantly pale complexion. Her
brown hair brought out all the golden color in her eyes, in which blue
streaks mingled as in Florentine marble; their expression seemed to
increase the significance of her words. A studied grace lay in the
charms of her bodice. Perhaps a rival might have found the lines of
the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a little hard; or found a fault
in the almost invisible down that covered her features. I saw the
signs of passion everywhere, written on those Italian eyelids, on the
splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo, on her features, in
the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick under-lip. She was not
merely a woman, but a romance. The whole blended harmony of lines, the
feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its passionate promise, were
subdued by a constant inexplicable reserve and modesty at variance
with everything else about her. It needed an observation as keen as my
own to detect such signs as these in her character. To explain myself
more clearly; there were two women in Foedora, divided perhaps by the
line between head and body: the one, the head alone, seemed to be
susceptible, and the other phlegmatic. She prepared her glance before
she looked at you, something unspeakably mysterious, some inward
convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering eyes.
"I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and
base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,
diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious
emotion that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through
my brain, setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the
tiniest nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them
all. A woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.
" 'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused
her aversion for love.'
"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue
des Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And
I was to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter,
with only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that
lay between us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in
cab-hire, gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like. If the Platonic
stage lasts a little too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter
of fact, there is many a Lauzun among students of law, who finds it
impossible to approach a ladylove living on a first floor. And I,
sickly, thin, poorly dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent
after a work, how could I compete with other young men, curled,
handsome, smart, outcravatting Croatia; wealthy men, equipped with
tilburys, and armed with assurance?
"That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I
saw the countess again in her white dress with its large graceful
sleeves, and all the fascinations of her form and movements. These
pictures of Foedora and her luxurious surroundings haunted me even in
my bare, cold garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any
naturalist's wig. The contrast suggested evil counsel; in such a way
crimes are conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respecting poverty, my
garret where such teeming fancies had stirred within me. I trembled
with fury, I reproached God, the devil, social conditions, my own
father, the whole universe, indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I
went hungry to bed, muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully
determined to win Foedora. Her heart was my last ticket in the
lottery, my fortune depended upon it.
"I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama the
sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed to engage her
intellect and her vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I
gave her any quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I
never left her in a state of indifference; women like emotions at any
cost, I gave them to her in plenty; I would rather have had her angry
with me than indifferent.
"At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed
a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me;
I relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell desperately in love.
"I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our poetry and
our talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready
rhetorical phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I
was lodging; nor among the feeble inventions of two centuries of our
literature, nor in any picture that Italy has produced, a
representation of the feelings that expanded all at once in my double
nature. The view of the lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the
Madonna of Murillo's now in the possession of General Soult,
Lescombat's letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of
anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and
passages in our fabliaux,--these things alone have power to carry me
back to the divine heights of my first love.
"How often has she not stood before me, called by the power of
ecstasy, in the silence of the night! Sometimes she would break in
upon me like a ray of light, make me drop my pen, and put science and
study to flight in grief and alarm, as she compelled my admiration by
the alluring pose I had seen but a short time before. Sometimes I went
to seek her in the spirit world, and would bow down to her as to a
hope, entreating her to let me hear the silver sounds of her voice,
and I would wake at length in tears.
"Once, when she had promised to go to the theatre with me, she took it
suddenly into her head to refuse to go out, and begged me to leave her
alone. I was in such despair over the perversity which cost me a day's
work, and (if I must confess it) my last shilling as well, that I went
alone where she was to have been, desiring to see the play she had
wished to see. I had scarcely seated myself when an electric shock
went through me. A voice told me, 'She is here!' I looked round, and
saw the countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the
first tier. My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at once with
incredible clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect
above its flower. How had my senses received this warning? There is
something in these inward tremors that shallow people find
astonishing, but the phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced
as simple as those of external vision; so I was not surprised, but
much vexed. My studies of our mental faculties, so little understood,
helped me at any rate to find in my own excitement some living proofs
of my theories. There was something exceedingly odd in this
combination of lover and man of science, of downright idolatry of a
woman with the love of knowledge. The causes of the lover's despair
were highly interesting to the man of science; and the exultant lover,
on the other hand, put science far away from him in his joy. Foedora
saw me, and grew grave: I annoyed her. I went to her box during the
first interval, and finding her alone, I stayed there. Although we had
not spoken of love, I foresaw an explanation. I had not told her my
secret, still there was a kind of understanding between us. She used
to tell me her plans for amusement, and on the previous evening had
asked with friendly eagerness if I meant to call the next day. After
any witticism of hers, she would give me an inquiring glance, as if
she had sought to please me alone by it. She would soothe me if I was
vexed; and if she pouted, I had in some sort a right to ask an
explanation. Before she would pardon any blunder, she would keep me a
suppliant for long. All these things that we so relished, were so many
lovers' quarrels. What arch grace she threw into it all! and what
happiness it was to me!
"But now we stood before each other as strangers, with the close
relation between us both suspended. The countess was glacial: a
presentiment of trouble filled me.
" 'Will you come home with me?' she said, when the play was over.
"There had been a sudden change in the weather, and sleet was falling
in showers as we went out. Foedora's carriage was unable to reach the
doorway of the theatre. At the sight of a well-dressed woman about to
cross the street, a commissionaire held an umbrella above us, and
stood waiting at the carriage-door for his tip. I would have given ten
years of life just then for a couple of halfpence, but I had not a
penny. All the man in me and all my vainest susceptibilities were
wrung with an infernal pain. The words, 'I haven't a penny about me,
my good fellow!' came from me in the hard voice of thwarted passion;
and yet I was that man's brother in misfortune, as I knew too well;
and once I had so lightly paid away seven hundred thousand francs! The
footman pushed the man aside, and the horses sprang forward. As we
returned, Foedora, in real or feigned abstraction, answered all my
questions curtly and by monosyllables. I said no more; it was a
hateful moment. When we reached her house, we seated ourselves by the
hearth, and when the servant had stirred the fire and left us alone,
the countess turned to me with an inexplicable expression, and spoke.
Her manner was almost solemn.
" 'Since my return to France, more than one young man, tempted by my
money, has made proposals to me which would have satisfied my pride. I
have come across men, too, whose attachment was so deep and sincere
that they might have married me even if they had found me the
penniless girl I used to be. Besides these, Monsieur de Valentin, you
must know that new titles and newly-acquired wealth have been also
offered to me, and that I have never received again any of those who
were so ill-advised as to mention love to me. If my regard for you was
but slight, I would not give you this warning, which is dictated by
friendship rather than by pride. A woman lays herself open to a rebuff
of some kind, if she imagines herself to be loved, and declines,
before it is uttered, to listen to language which in its nature
implies a compliment. I am well acquainted with the parts played by
Arsinoe and Araminta, and with the sort of answer I might look for
under such circumstances; but I hope to-day that I shall not find
myself misconstrued by a man of no ordinary character, because I have
frankly spoken my mind.'
"Foedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled all my hopes
beneath her feet; she maimed my life and she blighted my future with
the cool indifference and unconscious barbarity of an inquisitive
child who plucks its wings from a butterfly.
" 'Later on,' resumed Foedora, 'you will learn, I hope, the stability
of the affection that I keep for my friends. You will always find that
I have devotion and kindness for them. I would give my life to serve
my friends; but you could only despise me, if I allowed them to make
love to me without return. That is enough. You are the only man to
whom I have spoken such words as these last.'
"At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that arose within
me; but I soon repressed my emotions in the depths of my soul, and
began to smile.
" 'If I own that I love you,' I said, 'you will banish me at once; if
I plead guilty to indifference, you will make me suffer for it. Women,
magistrates, and priests never quite lay the gown aside. Silence is
non-committal; be pleased then, madame, to approve my silence. You
must have feared, in some degree, to lose me, or I should not have
received this friendly admonition; and with that thought my pride
ought to be satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. You
are perhaps the only woman with whom I could discuss rationally a
resolution so contrary to the laws of nature. Considered with regard
to your species, you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good
faith, the causes of this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in
you, as in many women, a certain pride in self, a love of your own
loveliness, a refinement of egoism which makes you shudder at the idea
of belonging to another; is it the thought of resigning your own will
and submitting to a superiority, though only of convention, which
displeases you? You would seem to me a thousand times fairer for it.
Can love formerly have brought you suffering? You probably set some
value on your dainty figure and graceful appearance, and may perhaps
wish to avoid the disfigurements of maternity. Is not this one of your
strongest reasons for refusing a too importunate love? Some natural
defect perhaps makes you insusceptible in spite of yourself? Do not be
angry; my study, my inquiry is absolutely dispassionate. Some are born
blind, and nature may easily have formed women who in like manner are
blind, deaf, and dumb to love. You are really an interesting subject
for medical investigation. You do not know your value. You feel
perhaps a very legitimate distaste for mankind; in that I quite concur
--to me they all seem ugly and detestable. And you are right,' I
added, feeling my heart swell within me; 'how can you do otherwise
than despise us? There is not a man living who is worthy of you.'
"I will not repeat all the biting words with which I ridiculed her. In
vain; my bitterest sarcasms and keenest irony never made her wince nor
elicited a sign of vexation. She heard me, with the customary smile
upon her lips and in her eyes, the smile that she wore as a part of
her clothing, and that never varied for friends, for mere
acquaintances, or for strangers.
" 'Isn't it very nice of me to allow you to dissect me like this?' she
said at last, as I came to a temporary standstill, and looked at her
in silence. 'You see,' she went on, laughing, 'that I have no foolish
over-sensitiveness about my friendship. Many a woman would shut her
door on you by way of punishing you for your impertinence.'
" 'You could banish me without needing to give me the reasons for your
harshness.' As I spoke I felt that I could kill her if she dismissed
me.
" 'Did you never think,' I went on, 'of the effects of passionate
love? A desperate man has often murdered his mistress.'
" 'It is better to die than to live in misery,' she said coolly. 'Such
a man as that would run through his wife's money, desert her, and
leave her at last in utter wretchedness.'
"This calm calculation dumfounded me. The gulf between us was made
plain; we could never understand each other.
"For a moment's space I hurled at her in a glance all the love I must
forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable
chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it
seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that
overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of
icy-sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, to think that she not only
had not guessed my poverty, but believed me to be as wealthy as she
was, and likewise borne as softly over the rough ways of life! What
failure and deceit! It was no mere question of money now, but of the
fate of all that lay within me.
"I went at haphazard, going over the words of our strange conversation
with myself. I got so thoroughly lost in my reflections that I ended
by doubts as to the actual value of words and ideas. But I loved her
all the same; I loved this woman with the untouched heart that might
surrender at any moment--a woman who daily disappointed the
expectations of the previous evening, by appearing as a new mistress
on the morrow.
"As I passed under the gateway of the Institute, a fevered thrill ran
through me. I remembered that I was fasting, and that I had not a
penny. To complete the measure of my misfortune, my hat was spoiled by
the rain. How was I to appear in the drawing-room of a woman of
fashion with an unpresentable hat? I had always cursed the inane and
stupid custom that compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and
to keep them always in our hands, but with anxious care I had so far
kept mine in a precarious state of efficiency. It had been neither
strikingly new, nor utterly shabby, neither napless nor over-glossy,
and might have passed for the hat of a frugally given owner, but its
artificially prolonged existence had now reached the final stage, it
was crumpled, forlorn, and completely ruined, a downright rag, a
fitting emblem of its master. My painfully preserved elegance must
collapse for want of thirty sous.
"What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three months for
Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week's sustenance to see
her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least
of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed,
run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce
as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer
the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course
of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white
waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and
bedraggled, and had not so much as five sous to give to a shoeblack
for removing the least little spot of mud from my boot! The petty
pangs of these nameless torments, which an irritable man finds so
great, only strengthened my passion.
"The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not mention to
women who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such women see things
through a prism that gilds all men and their surroundings. Egoism
leads them to take cheerful views, and fashion makes them cruel; they
do not wish to reflect, lest they lose their happiness, and the
absorbing nature of their pleasures absolves their indifference to the
misfortunes of others. A penny never means millions to them; millions,
on the contrary, seem a mere trifle. Perhaps love must plead his cause
by great sacrifices, but a veil must be lightly drawn across them,
they must go down into silence. So when wealthy men pour out their
devotion, their fortunes, and their lives, they gain somewhat by these
commonly entertained opinions, an additional lustre hangs about their
lovers' follies; their silence is eloquent; there is a grace about the
drawn veil; but my terrible distress bound me over to suffer fearfully
or ever I might speak of my love or of dying for her sake.
"Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded by the joy I
took in sacrificing everything to her? There was no commonest event of
my daily life to which the countess had not given importance, had not
overfilled with happiness. I had been hitherto careless of my clothes,
now I respected my coat as if it had been a second self. I should not
have hesitated between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You
must enter wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy
thoughts, the gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and which,
perhaps, were increased by my walk. I gloated in an infernal fashion
which I cannot describe over the absolute completeness of my
wretchedness. I would have drawn from it an augury of my future, but
there is no limit to the possibilities of misfortune. The door of my
lodging-house stood ajar. A light streamed from the heart-shaped
opening cut in the shutters. Pauline and her mother were sitting up
for me and talking. I heard my name spoken, and listened.
" 'You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,' was Madame
Gaudin's comment.
"I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went into their
room to take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light for me. The dear
child had just poured soothing balm into my wounds. Her outspoken
admiration had given me fresh courage. I so needed to believe in
myself and to come by a just estimate of my advantages. This revival
of hope in me perhaps colored my surroundings. Perhaps also I had
never before really looked at the picture that so often met my eyes,
of the two women in their room; it was a scene such as Flemish
painters have reproduced so faithfully for us, that I admired in its
delightful reality. The mother, with the kind smile upon her lips, sat
knitting stockings by the dying fire; Pauline was painting hand-
screens, her brushes and paints, strewn over the tiny table, made
bright spots of color for the eye to dwell on. When she had left her
seat and stood lighting my lamp, one must have been under the yoke of
a terrible passion indeed, not to admire her faintly flushed
transparent hands, the girlish charm of her attitude, the ideal grace
of her head, as the lamplight fell full on her pale face. Night and
silence added to the charms of this industrious vigil and peaceful
interior. The light-heartedness that sustained such continuous toil
could only spring from devout submission and the lofty feelings that
it brings.
" 'Dieu! how pale you are! and you are wet through! My mother will try
to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,' she went on, after a little pause,
'you are so very fond of milk, and to-night we happen to have some
cream. Here, will you not take some?'
"She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. She did it
so quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I hesitated.
" 'You are going to refuse me?' she said, and her tones changed.
"The pride in each felt for the other's pride. It was Pauline's
poverty that seemed to humiliate her, and to reproach me with my want
of consideration, and I melted at once and accepted the cream that
might have been meant for her morning's breakfast. The poor child
tried not to show her joy, but her eyes sparkled.
" 'I needed it badly,' I said as I sat down. (An anxious look passed
over her face.) 'Do you remember that passage, Pauline, where Bossuet
tells how God gave more abundant reward for a cup of cold water than
for a victory?'
" 'Yes,' she said, her heart beating like some wild bird's in a
child's hands.
" 'Oh, don't let us cast accounts,' she said laughing. But her
laughter covered an agitation that gave me pain. I went on without
appearing to hear her words:
" 'My piano is one of Erard's best instruments; and you must take it.
Pray accept it without hesitation; I really could not take it with me
on the journey I am about to make.'
" 'Don't take it to heart so,' the mother said; 'stay on here. My
husband is on his way towards us even now,' she went on. 'I looked
into the Gospel of St. John this evening while Pauline hung our door-
key in a Bible from her fingers. The key turned; that means that
Gaudin is in health and doing well. Pauline began again for you and
for the young man in number seven--it turned for you, but not for him.
We are all going to be rich. Gaudin will come back a millionaire. I
dreamed once that I saw him in a ship full of serpents; luckily the
water was rough, and that means gold or precious stones from over-
sea.'
"The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby with which a
mother soothes her sick child; they in a manner calmed me. There was a
pleasant heartiness in the worthy woman's looks and tones, which, if
it could not remove trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and
deadened the pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me
uneasily; her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my future. I
thanked the mother and daughter by an inclination of the head, and
hurried away; I was afraid I should break down.
"I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself down in my
misery. My unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects,
and prescribed impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the
wreck of his fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was
engulfed. Ah, my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched.
Let us be less harsh on the results of the most powerful of all social
solvents. Where poverty is absolute there exist no such things as
shame or crime, or virtue or intelligence. I knew not what to do; I
was as defenceless as a maiden on her knees before a beast of prey. A
penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any
rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to
himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in
our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then
and so it begins for us the cruelest trouble of all--the misery with a
hope in it, a hope for which we must even bear our torments. I thought
I would go to Rastignac on the morrow to confide Foedora's strange
resolution to him, and with that I slept.
" 'Ah, ha!' cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodging at nine
o'clock in the morning. 'I know what brings you here. Foedora has
dismissed you. Some kind souls, who were jealous of your ascendency
over the countess, gave out that you were going to be married. Heaven
only knows what follies your rivals have equipped you with, and what
slanders have been directed at you.'
" 'Not quite so fast,' urged the prudent Gascon; 'Foedora has all the
sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman; perhaps she may have
taken your measure while you still coveted only her money and her
splendor; in spite of all your care, she could have read you through
and through. She can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation
pass undetected. I fear,' he went on, 'that I have brought you into a
bad way. In spite of her cleverness and her tact, she seems to me a
domineering sort of person, like every woman who can only feel
pleasure through her brain. Happiness for her lies entirely in a
comfortable life and in social pleasures; her sentiment is only
assumed; she will make you miserable; you will be her head footman.'
" 'Yesterday evening,' he rejoined, 'luck ran against me, and that
carried off all my available cash. But for that trivial mishap, I
would gladly have shared my purse with you. But let us go and
breakfast at the restaurant; perhaps there is good counsel in
oysters.'
"He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We went to the Cafe de
Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed with all the audacious
impertinence of the speculator whose capital is imaginary. That devil
of a Gascon quite disconcerted me by the coolness of his manners and
his absolute self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an
excellent and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who did not
escape Rastignac. He had been nodding here and there among the crowd
to this or that young man, distinguished both by personal attractions
and elegant attire, and now he said to me:
" 'That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books that he
doesn't understand a word of,' whispered Rastignac; 'he is a chemist,
a historian, a novelist, and a political writer; he has gone halves,
thirds, or quarters in the authorship of I don't know how many plays,
and he is as ignorant as Dom Miguel's mule. He is not a man so much as
a name, a label that the public is familiar with. So he would do well
to avoid shops inscribed with the motto, "Ici l'on peut ecrire soi-
meme." He is acute enough to deceive an entire congress of
diplomatists. In a couple of words, he is a moral half-caste, not
quite a fraud, nor entirely genuine. But, hush! he has succeeded
already; nobody asks anything further, and every one calls him an
illustrious man.'
" 'Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may Your
Intelligence be?' So Rastignac addressed the stranger as he sat down
at a neighboring table.
" 'Neither well nor ill; I am overwhelmed with work. I have all the
necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my
hands, and I cannot find any one to whom I can ascribe them. It
worries me, for I shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling
out of fashion.'
" 'He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your memoirs
for you, in his aunt's name, for a hundred crowns a volume.'
" 'It's a bargain,' said the other, adjusting his cravat. 'Waiter, my
oysters.'
" 'Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commission, and you
will pay him in advance for each volume,' said Rastignac.
" 'No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, and then I
shall be sure of having my manuscript punctually.'
" 'We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon you to arrange the
affair?'
" 'Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven o'clock.'
"We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put the bill in
his pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupified by the flippancy
and ease with which he had sold my venerable aunt, la Marquise de
Montbauron.
" 'I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the Indians
lessons in algebra, though I don't know a word of it, than tarnish my
family name.'
" 'How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first instance, and
write the memoirs. When you have finished them, you will decline to
publish them in your aunt's name, imbecile! Madame de Montbauron, with
her hooped petticoat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her
death upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred
francs. And then, if the trade will not give your aunt her due, some
old adventurer, or some shady countess or other, will be found to put
her name to the memoirs.'
" 'Oh,' I groaned; 'why did I quit the blameless life in my garret?
This world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.'
" 'Yes,' said Rastignac, 'that is all very poetical, but this is a
matter of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to
your work, the public will decide upon it; and as for my literary
middle-man, hasn't he devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a
footing in the book-trade, and paid heavily for his experience? You
divide the money and the labor of the book with him very unequally,
but isn't yours the better part? Twenty-five louis means as much to
you as a thousand francs does to him. Come, you can write historical
memoirs, a work of art such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six
sermons for a hundred crowns!'
" 'After all,' I said, in agitation, 'I cannot choose but do it. So,
my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
twenty-five louis.'
" 'Richer than you think,' he laughed. 'If I have my commission from
Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can't you see? Now let us go to
the Bois de Boulogne,' he said; 'we shall see your countess there, and
I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry--a charming
woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean
Paul, and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually
asking my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this
German sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads--drugs, all of them,
that my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to
wean her from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as
she reads Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her,
for she has an income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the
prettiest little hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say
mon ange and brouiller instead of mon anche and prouiller, she would
be perfection!'
"We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The
coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me
seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I
fancied myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and
my troubles were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I
found my friend's lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven--all
nature--seemed to reflect Foedora's smile for me.
" 'The man is waiting for an answer,' said Pauline, after quietly
waiting for a moment.
"I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening
came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectual prowess that method
and toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable
painfully vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my
window; the weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I
might easily hire a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me
every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too
weak to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt
sure that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my
room; I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I
hunted about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous
fever seized me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had
ransacked it all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that
possessed me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I
opened my writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid ten-
franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and
slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account
for its previous reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty
in thus lying hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity,
and hailed it with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply,
to find Pauline with a face grown white.
" 'I thought,' she faltered, 'that you had hurt yourself! The man who
brought the letter----' (she broke off as if something smothered her
voice). 'But mother has paid him,' she added, and flitted away like a
wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in
my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that
I felt as if I had stolen from them.
"The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the
countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty
women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on
foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.
" 'It will rain,' I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.
"As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud,
whose progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the
Museum I was about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!)
asked me not to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for
me, to chat with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray
down the shady alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret
transports repressed in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and
foolish smile upon my lips; there was something unreal about it all.
Yet in all her movements, however alluring, whether we stood or
whether we walked, there was nothing either tender or lover-like. When
I tried to share in a measure the action of movement prompted by her
life, I became aware of a check, or of something strange in her that I
cannot explain, or an inner activity concealed in her nature. There is
no suavity about the movements of women who have no soul in them. Our
wills were opposed, and we did not keep step together. Words are
wanting to describe this outward dissonance between two beings; we are
not accustomed to read a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel
this phenomenon of our nature, but it cannot be expressed.
" 'The influence of the Duc de Navarreins would be very useful to me,
with an all-powerful person in Russia,' she went on, persuasion in
every modulation of her voice, 'whose intervention I need in order to
have justice done me in a matter that concerns both my fortune and my
position in the world, that is to say, the recognition of my marriage
by the Emperor. Is not the Duc de Navarreins a cousin of yours? A
letter from him would settle everything.'
" 'You are very nice,' she said, pressing my hand. 'Come and have
dinner with me, and I will tell you everything, as if you were my
confessor.'
"So this discreet, suspicious woman, who had never been heard to speak
a word about her affairs to any one, was going to consult me.
" 'Oh, how dear to me is this silence that you have imposed on me!' I
cried; 'but I would rather have had some sharper ordeal still.' And
she smiled upon the intoxication in my eyes; she did not reject my
admiration in any way; surely she loved me!
"During the dinner she lavished attention upon me, and put charm
without end into those numberless trifles to all seeming, that make up
half of our existence nevertheless. As we sat together before a
crackling fire, on silken cushions surrounded by the most desirable
creations of Oriental luxury; as I saw this woman whose famous beauty
made every heart beat, so close to me; an unapproachable woman who was
talking and bringing all her powers of coquetry to bear upon me; then
my blissful pleasure rose almost to the point of suffering. To my
vexation, I recollected the important business to be concluded; I
determined to go to keep the appointment made for me for this evening.
"She loved me, then! or I thought so at least, from the bland tones in
which those two words were uttered. I would then have bartered a
couple of years of life for every hour she chose to grant to me, and
so prolong my ecstasy. My happiness was increased by the extent of the
money I sacrificed. It was midnight before she dismissed me. But on
the morrow, for all that, my heroism cost me a good many remorseful
pangs; I was afraid the affair of the Memoirs, now of such importance
for me, might have fallen through, and rushed off to Rastignac. We
found the nominal author of my future labors just getting up.
"The monastic life of study that I had led for three years past ended
on this day. I frequented Foedora's house very diligently, and tried
to outshine the heroes or the swaggerers to be found in her circle.
When I believed that I had left poverty for ever behind me, I regained
my freedom of mind, humiliated my rivals, and was looked upon as a
very attractive, dazzling, and irresistible sort of man. But acute
folk used to say with regard to me, 'A fellow as clever as that will
keep all his enthusiasms in his brain,' and charitably extolled my
faculties at the expense of my feelings. 'Isn't he lucky, not to be in
love!' they exclaimed. 'If he were, could he be so light-hearted and
animated?' Yet in Foedora's presence I was as dull as love could make
me. When I was alone with her, I had not a word to say, or if I did
speak, I renounced love; and I affected gaiety but ill, like a
courtier who has a bitter mortification to hide. I tried in every way
to make myself indispensable in her life, and necessary to her vanity
and to her comfort; I was a plaything at her pleasure, a slave always
at her side. And when I had frittered away the day in this way, I went
back to my work at night, securing merely two or three hours' sleep in
the early morning.
"I had rejoiced over a sacrifice to make for her, and almost
humiliated myself in seeking out my kinsman, the Duc de Navarreins, a
selfish man who was ashamed of my poverty, and had injured me too
deeply not to hate me. He received me with the polite coldness that
makes every word and gesture seem an insult; he looked so ill at ease
that I pitied him. I blushed for this pettiness amid grandeur, and
penuriousness surrounded by luxury. He began to talk to me of his
heavy losses in the three per cents, and then I told him the object of
my visit. The change in his manners, hitherto glacial, which now
gradually, became affectionate, disgusted me.
"On him Foedora exercised spells and witcheries unheard of; she drew
him into her power, and arranged her whole mysterious business with
him; I was left out, I heard not a word of it; she had made a tool of
me! She did not seem to be aware of my existence while my cousin was
present; she received me less cordially perhaps than when I was first
presented to her. One evening she chose to mortify me before the duke
by a look, a gesture, that it is useless to try to express in words. I
went away with tears in my eyes, planning terrible and outrageous
schemes of vengeance without end.
"I often used to go with her to the theatre. Love utterly absorbed me
as I sat beside her; as I looked at her I used to give myself up to
the pleasure of listening to the music, putting all my soul into the
double joy of love and of hearing every emotion of my heart translated
into musical cadences. It was my passion that filled the air and the
stage, that was triumphant everywhere but with my mistress. Then I
would take Foedora's hand. I used to scan her features and her eyes,
imploring of them some indication that one blended feeling possessed
us both, seeking for the sudden harmony awakened by the power of
music, which makes our souls vibrate in unison; but her hand was
passive, her eyes said nothing.
"When the fire that burned in me glowed too fiercely from the face I
turned upon her, she met it with that studied smile of hers, the
conventional expression that sits on the lips of every portrait in
every exhibition. She was not listening to the music. The divine pages
of Rossini, Cimarosa, or Zingarelli called up no emotion, gave no
voice to any poetry in her life; her soul was a desert.
" 'I shall always have money,' she said; 'and with money we can always
inspire such sentiments as are necessary for our comfort in those
about us.'
"There was a craze just then for praising a play at a little Boulevard
theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear original that besets us
all, or due to some freak of fashion. The countess showed some signs
of a wish to see the floured face of the actor who had so delighted
several people of taste, and I obtained the honor of taking her to a
first presentation of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely
cost five francs, but I had not a brass farthing. I was but half-way
through the volume of Memoirs; I dared not beg for assistance of
Finot, and Rastignac, my providence, was away. These constant
perplexities were the bane of my life.
"We had once come out of the theatre when it was raining heavily,
Foedora had called a cab for me before I could escape from her show of
concern; she would not admit any of my excuses--my liking for wet
weather, and my wish to go to the gaming-table. She did not read my
poverty in my embarrassed attitude, or in my forced jests. My eyes
would redden, but she did not understand a look. A young man's life is
at the mercy of the strangest whims! At every revolution of the wheels
during the journey, thoughts that burned stirred in my heart. I tried
to pull up a plank from the bottom of the vehicle, hoping to slip
through the hole into the street; but finding insuperable obstacles, I
burst into a fit of laughter, and then sat stupefied in calm
dejection, like a man in a pillory. When I reached my lodging, Pauline
broke in through my first stammering words with:
"Ah, the music of Rossini was as nothing compared with those words.
But to return to the performance at the Funambules.
"Pauline was working; her mother had gone to bed. I flung a stealthy
glance over the bed; the curtains were drawn back a little; Madame
Gaudin was in a deep sleep, I thought, when I saw her quiet, sallow
profile outlined against the pillow.
" 'You are in trouble?' Pauline said, dipping her brush into the
coloring.
" 'Is it possible that she loves me?' I thought. 'Pauline,' I began. I
went and sat near to her, so as to study her. My tones had been so
searching that she read my thought; her eyes fell, and I scrutinized
her face. It was so pure and frank that I fancied I could see as
clearly into her heart as into my own.
"Then she did not love me. Her jesting tones, and a little gleeful
movement that escaped her, expressed nothing beyond a girlish, blithe
goodwill. I told her about my distress and the predicament in which I
found myself, and asked her to help me.
" 'Oh, I would willingly go,' she said, 'but it is not necessary. I
found two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, that had slipped
without your knowledge between the frame and the keyboard, and I laid
them on your table.'
" 'You will soon be coming into some money, M. Raphael,' said the kind
mother, showing her face between the curtains, 'and I can easily lend
you a few crowns meanwhile.'
" 'Oh, Pauline!' I cried, as I pressed her hand, 'how I wish that I
were rich!'
" 'Bah! why should you?' she said petulantly. Her hand shook in mine
with the throbbing of her pulse; she snatched it away, and looked at
both of mine.
" 'You will marry a rich wife,' she said, 'but she will give you a
great deal of trouble. Ah, Dieu! she will be your death,--I am sure of
it.'
"In her exclamation there was something like belief in her mother's
absurd superstitions.
" 'The woman whom you will love is going to kill you--there is no
doubt of it,' she said, looking at me with alarm.
"She took up her brush again and dipped it in the color; her great
agitation was evident; she looked at me no longer. I was ready to give
credence just then to superstitious fancies; no man is utterly
wretched so long as he is superstitious; a belief of that kind is
often in reality a hope.
"I found that those two magnificent five-franc pieces were lying, in
fact, upon my table when I reached my room. During the first confused
thoughts of early slumber, I tried to audit my accounts so as to
explain this unhoped-for windfall; but I lost myself in useless
calculations, and slept. Just as I was leaving my room to engage a box
the next morning, Pauline came to see me.
" 'Perhaps your ten francs is not enough,' said the amiable, kind-
hearted girl; 'my mother told me to offer you this money. Take it,
please, take it!'
"She laid three crowns upon the table, and tried to escape, but I
would not let her go. Admiration dried the tears that sprang to my
eyes.
" 'You are an angel, Pauline,' I said. 'It is not the loan that
touches me so much as the delicacy with which it is offered. I used to
wish for a rich wife, a fashionable woman of rank; and now, alas! I
would rather possess millions, and find some girl, as poor as you are,
with a generous nature like your own; and I would renounce a fatal
passion which will kill me. Perhaps what you told me will come true.'
" 'That is enough,' she said, and fled away; the fresh trills of her
birdlike voice rang up the staircase.
" 'She is very happy in not yet knowing love,' I said to myself,
thinking of the torments I had endured for many months past.
"I sat beside her in the cramped back seat of the vehicle; all the way
I could feel her breath on me and the contact of her perfumed glove; I
saw distinctly all her exceeding beauty; I inhaled a vague scent of
orris-root; so wholly a woman she was, with no touch of womanhood.
Just then a sudden gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious
life for me. I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet,
a genuine conception of the artist, in the shape of the statue of
Polycletus.
"As soon as the rooms began to fill, I entered the bedroom and
examined the arrangements. The inner and outer shutters were closed;
this was a good beginning; and as the waiting-maid might come to draw
back the curtains that hung over the windows, I pulled them together.
I was running great risks in venturing to manoeuvre beforehand in this
way, but I had accepted the situation, and had deliberately reckoned
with its dangers.
"I heard vague murmurs from the salons, the laughter and the louder
tones of the speakers. The smothered commotion and vague uproar
lessened by slow degrees. One man and another came for his hat from
the countess' chest of drawers, close to where I stood. I shivered, if
the curtains were disturbed, at the thought of the mischances
consequent on the confused and hasty investigations made by the men in
a hurry to depart, who were rummaging everywhere. When I experienced
no misfortunes of this kind, I augured well of my enterprise. An old
wooer of Foedora's came for the last hat; he thought himself quite
alone, looked at the bed, and heaved a great sigh, accompanied by some
inaudible exclamation, into which he threw sufficient energy. In the
boudoir close by, the countess, finding only some five or six intimate
acquaintances about her, proposed tea. The scandals for which existing
society has reserved the little faculty of belief that it retains,
mingled with epigrams and trenchant witticisms, and the clatter of
cups and spoons. Rastignac drew roars of laughter by merciless
sarcasms at the expense of my rivals.
" 'I am quite of that opinion,' was his candid reply. 'I have always
been right about my aversions--and my friendships as well,' he added.
'Perhaps my enemies are quite as useful to me as my friends. I have
made a particular study of modern phraseology, and of the natural
craft that is used in all attack or defence. Official eloquence is one
of our perfect social products.
" 'One of your friends is not clever, so you speak of his integrity
and his candor. Another's work is heavy; you introduce it as a piece
of conscientious labor; and if the book is ill written, you extol the
ideas it contains. Such an one is treacherous and fickle, slips
through your fingers every moment; bah! he is attractive, bewitching,
he is delightful! Suppose they are enemies, you fling every one, dead
or alive, in their teeth. You reverse your phraseology for their
benefit, and you are as keen in detecting their faults as you were
before adroit in bringing out the virtues of your friends. This way of
using the mental lorgnette is the secret of conversation nowadays, and
the whole art of the complete courtier. If you neglect it, you might
as well go out as an unarmed knight-banneret to fight against men in
armor. And I make use of it, and even abuse it at times. So we are
respected--I and my friends; and, moreover, my sword is quite as sharp
as my tongue.'
" 'There is a future before him,' said Rastignac. 'Some day he may be
in a position to take a cruel revenge; his talents are at least equal
to his courage; and I should consider those who attack him very rash,
for he has a good memory----'
" 'And writes Memoirs,' put in the countess, who seemed to object to
the deep silence that prevailed.
" 'I give him credit for plenty of courage,' she answered; 'he is
faithful to me.'
"I was greatly tempted to show myself suddenly among the railers, like
the shade of Banquo in Macbeth. I should have lost a mistress, but I
had a friend! But love inspired me all at once, with one of those
treacherous and fallacious subtleties that it can use to soothe all
our pangs.
"If Foedora loved me, I thought, she would be sure to disguise her
feelings by some mocking jest. How often the heart protests against a
lie on the lips!
"Well, very soon my audacious rival, left alone with the countess,
rose to go.
" 'What! already?' asked she in a coaxing voice that set my heart
beating. 'Will you not give me a few more minutes? Have you nothing
more to say to me? will you never sacrifice any of your pleasures for
me?'
" 'Ah!' she yawned; 'how very tiresome they all are!'
"She pulled a cord energetically till the sound of a bell rang through
the place; then, humming a few notes of Pria che spunti, the countess
entered her room. No one had ever heard her sing; her muteness had
called forth the wildest explanations. She had promised her first
lover, so it was said, who had been held captive by her talent, and
whose jealousy over her stretched beyond his grave, that she would
never allow others to experience a happiness that he wished to be his
and his alone.
"I exerted every power of my soul to catch the sounds. Higher and
higher rose the notes; Foedora's life seemed to dilate within her; her
throat poured forth all its richest tones; something well-nigh divine
entered into the melody. There was a bright purity and clearness of
tone in the countess' voice, a thrilling harmony which reached the
heart and stirred its pulses. Musicians are seldom unemotional; a
woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed. Her
beautiful voice made one more puzzle in a woman mysterious enough
before. I beheld her then, as plainly as I see you at this moment. She
seemed to listen to herself, to experience a secret rapture of her
own; she felt, as it were, an ecstasy like that of love.
"She stood before the hearth during the execution of the principal
theme of the rondo; and when she ceased her face changed. She looked
tired; her features seemed to alter. She had laid the mask aside; her
part as an actress was over. Yet the faded look that came over her
beautiful face, a result either of this performance or of the
evening's fatigues, had its charms, too.
"She set her foot on a bronze bar of the fender as if to warm it, took
off her gloves, and drew over her head the gold chain from which her
bejeweled scent-bottle hung. It gave me a quite indescribable pleasure
to watch the feline grace of every movement; the supple grace a cat
displays as it adjusts its toilette in the sun. She looked at herself
in the mirror and said aloud ill-humoredly--'I did not look well this
evening, my complexion is going with alarming rapidity; perhaps I
ought to keep earlier hours, and give up this life of dissipation.
Does Justine mean to trifle with me?' She rang again; her maid hurried
in. Where she had been I cannot tell; she came in by a secret
staircase. I was anxious to make a study of her. I had lodged
accusations, in my romantic imaginings, against this invisible
waiting-woman, a tall, well-made brunette.
" 'Yes, twice,' answered Foedora; 'are you really growing deaf
nowadays?'
"Justine knelt down before her, unlaced her sandals and drew them off,
while her mistress lay carelessly back on her cushioned armchair
beside the fire, yawned, and scratched her head. Every movement was
perfectly natural; there was nothing whatever to indicate the secret
sufferings or emotions with which I had credited her.
" 'George must be in love!' she remarked. 'I shall dismiss him. He has
drawn the curtains again to-night. What does he mean by it?'
" 'Life is very empty,' the countess went on. 'Ah! be careful not to
scratch me as you did yesterday. Just look here, I still have the
marks of your nails about me,' and she held out a silken knee. She
thrust her bare feet into velvet slippers bound with swan's-down, and
unfastened her dress, while Justine prepared to comb her hair.
" 'That way of crimping your hair too much is the least becoming way
possible for you. Large, smooth curls suit you a great deal better.'
" 'Really?'
" 'Yes, really, madame; that wavy style only looks nice in fair hair.'
"Justine unlaced her. I watched her carefully when she was at last
unveiled. Her maidenly form, in its rose-tinged whiteness, was visible
through her shift in the taper light, as dazzling as some silver
statue behind its gauze covering. No, there was no defect that need
shrink from the stolen glances of love. Alas, a fair form will
overcome the stoutest resolutions!
"The maid lighted the taper in the alabaster sconce that hung before
the bed, while her mistress sat thoughtful and silent before the fire.
Justine went for a warming-pan, turned down the bed, and helped to lay
her mistress in it; then, after some further time spent in
punctiliously rendering various services that showed how seriously
Foedora respected herself, her maid left her. The countess turned to
and fro several times, and sighed; she was ill at ease; faint, just
perceptible sounds, like sighs of impatience, escaped from her lips.
She reached out a hand to the table, and took a flask from it, from
which she shook four or five drops of some brown liquid into some milk
before taking it; again there followed some painful sighs, and the
exclamation, 'MON DIEU!'
"The cry, and the tone in which it was uttered, wrung my heart. By
degrees she lay motionless. This frightened me; but very soon I heard
a sleeper's heavy, regular breathing. I drew the rustling silk
curtains apart, left my post, went to the foot of the bed, and gazed
at her with feelings that I cannot define. She was so enchanting as
she lay like a child, with her arm above her head; but the sweetness
of the fair, quiet visage, surrounded by the lace, only irritated me.
I had not been prepared for the torture to which I was compelled to
submit.
" 'Mon Dieu!' that scrap of a thought which I understood not, but must
even take as my sole light, had suddenly modified my opinion of
Foedora. Trite or profoundly significant, frivolous or of deep import,
the words might be construed as expressive of either pleasure or pain,
of physical or of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction,
a forecast or a memory, a fear or a regret? A whole life lay in that
utterance, a life of wealth or of penury; perhaps it contained a
crime!
"The mystery that lurked beneath this fair semblance of womanhood grew
afresh; there were so many ways of explaining Foedora, that she became
inexplicable. A sort of language seemed to flow from between her lips.
I put thoughts and feelings into the accidents of her breathing,
whether weak or regular, gentle, or labored. I shared her dreams; I
would fain have divined her secrets by reading them through her
slumber. I hesitated among contradictory opinions and decisions
without number. I could not deny my heart to the woman I saw before
me, with the calm, pure beauty in her face. I resolved to make one
more effort. If I told her the story of my life, my love, my
sacrifices, might I not awaken pity in her or draw a tear from her who
never wept?
"As I set all my hopes on this last experiment, the sounds in the
streets showed that day was at hand. For a moment's space I pictured
Foedora waking to find herself in my arms. I could have stolen softly
to her side and slipped them about her in a close embrace. Resolved to
resist the cruel tyranny of this thought, I hurried into the salon,
heedless of any sounds I might make; but, luckily, I came upon a
secret door leading to a little staircase. As I expected, the key was
in the lock; I slammed the door, went boldly out into the court, and
gained the street in three bounds, without looking round to see
whether I was observed.
"A dramatist was to read a comedy at the countess' house in two days'
time; I went thither, intending to outstay the others, so as to make a
rather singular request to her; I meant to ask her to keep the
following evening for me alone, and to deny herself to other comers;
but when I found myself alone with her, my courage failed. Every tick
of the clock alarmed me. It wanted only a quarter of an hour of
midnight.
" 'If I do not speak,' I thought to myself, 'I must smash my head
against the corner of the mantelpiece.'
"I gave myself three minutes' grace; the three minutes went by, and I
did not smash my head upon the marble; my heart grew heavy, like a
sponge with water.
" 'What is the matter with you?' she asked. 'You are turning pale.'
" 'Willingly,' she answered' 'but why will you not speak to me now?'
" 'To be candid with you, I ought to explain the full scope of your
promise: I want to spend this evening by your side, as if we were
brother and sister. Have no fear; I am aware of your antipathies; you
must have divined me sufficiently to feel sure that I should wish you
to do nothing that could be displeasing to you; presumption, moreover,
would not thus approach you. You have been a friend to me, you have
shown me kindness and great indulgence; know, therefore, that
to-morrow I must bid you farewell.--Do not take back your word,' I
exclaimed, seeing her about to speak, and I went away.
"At eight o'clock one evening towards the end of May, Foedora and I
were alone together in her gothic boudoir. I feared no longer; I was
secure of happiness. My mistress should be mine, or I would seek a
refuge in death. I had condemned my faint-hearted love, and a man who
acknowledges his weakness is strong indeed.
" 'Do you know that you have piqued my curiosity?' she said, laughing.
" 'I will not disappoint it,' I said quietly, as I seated myself near
to her and took the hand that she surrendered to me. 'You have a very
beautiful voice!'
"We spent about an hour in familiar talk. While I adopted the attitude
and manner of a man to whom Foedora must refuse nothing, I showed her
all a lover's deference. Acting in this way, I received a favor--I was
allowed to kiss her hand. She daintily drew off the glove, and my
whole soul was dissolved and poured forth in that kiss. I was steeped
in the bliss of an illusion in which I tried to believe.
"She nodded.
" 'I had laid out my last five-franc piece that I might see you there.
--Do you recollect our walk in the Jardin des Plantes? The hire of
your cab took everything I had.'
"I told her about my sacrifices, and described the life I led; heated
not with wine, as I am to-day, but by the generous enthusiasm of my
heart, my passion overflowed in burning words; I have forgotten how
the feelings within me blazed forth; neither memory nor skill of mine
could possibly reproduce it. It was no colorless chronicle of blighted
affections; my love was strengthened by fair hopes; and such words
came to me, by love's inspiration, that each had power to set forth a
whole life--like echoes of the cries of a soul in torment. In such
tones the last prayers ascend from dying men on the battlefield. I
stopped, for she was weeping. GRAND DIEU! I had reaped an actor's
reward, the success of a counterfeit passion displayed at the cost of
five francs paid at the theatre door. I had drawn tears from her.
" 'Do not finish the sentence,' I broke in. 'Even now I love you well
enough to murder you----'
" 'Do not call any one,' I said. 'I shall leave you to finish your
life in peace. It would be a blundering kind of hatred that would
murder you! You need not fear violence of any kind; I have spent a
whole night at the foot of your bed without----'
" 'Monsieur----' she said, blushing; but after that first impulse of
modesty that even the most hardened women must surely own, she flung a
scornful glance at me, and said:
" 'Do you think that I set such value on your beauty, madame,' I
answered, guessing the thoughts that moved her. 'Your beautiful face
is for me a promise of a soul yet more beautiful. Madame, those to
whom a woman is merely a woman can always purchase odalisques fit for
the seraglio, and achieve their happiness at a small cost. But I
aspired to something higher; I wanted the life of close communion of
heart and heart with you that have no heart. I know that now. If you
were to belong to another, I could kill him. And yet, no; for you
would love him, and his death might hurt you perhaps. What agony this
is!' I cried.
" 'If it is any comfort to you,' she retorted cheerfully, 'I can
assure you that I shall never belong to any one----'
" 'So you offer an affront to God Himself,' I interrupted; 'and you
will be punished for it. Some day you will lie upon your sofa
suffering unheard-of ills, unable to endure the light or the slightest
sound, condemned to live as it were in the tomb. Then, when you seek
the causes of those lingering and avenging torments, you will remember
the woes that you distributed so lavishly upon your way. You have sown
curses, and hatred will be your reward. We are the real judges, the
executioners of a justice that reigns here below, which overrules the
justice of man and the laws of God.'
" 'No doubt it is very culpable in me not to love you,' she said,
laughing. 'Am I to blame? No. I do not love you; you are a man, that
is sufficient. I am happy by myself; why should I give up my way of
living, a selfish way, if you will, for the caprices of a master?
Marriage is a sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but
vexations to the other. Children, moreover, worry me. Did I not
faithfully warn you about my nature? Why are you not satisfied to have
my friendship? I wish I could make you amends for all the troubles I
have caused you, through not guessing the value of your poor five-
franc pieces. I appreciate the extent of your sacrifices; but your
devotion and delicate tact can be repaid by love alone, and I care so
little for you, that this scene has a disagreeable effect upon me.'
" 'Men always repeat these classic formulas to us, more or less
effectively,' she answered, still smiling. 'But it appears very
difficult to die at our feet, for I see corpses of that kind about
everywhere. It is twelve o'clock. Allow me to go to bed.'
" 'And in two hours' time you will cry to yourself, AH, MON DIEU!'
" 'Like the day before yesterday! Yes,' she said, 'I was thinking of
my stockbroker; I had forgotten to tell him to convert my five per
cent stock into threes, and the three per cents had fallen during the
day.'
"I looked at her, and my eyes glittered with anger. Sometimes a crime
may be a whole romance; I understood that just then. She was so
accustomed, no doubt, to the most impassioned declarations of this
kind, that my words and my tears were forgotten already.
" 'Permit me to accompany you to the door,' she said, cutting irony in
her tones, in the poise of her head, and in her gesture.
" 'Madame----'
" 'Monsieur?'
" 'I hope not,' and she insolently inclined her head.
" 'You made good use of the time you spent with the advocate,' she
said smiling. 'There is a fervency about your pleadings.'
" 'The present is yours,' I cried, 'but the future is mine! I only
lose a woman; you are losing a name and a family. Time is big with my
revenge; time will spoil your beauty, and yours will be a solitary
death; and glory waits for me!'
" 'Thanks for your peroration!' she said, repressing a yawn; the wish
that she might never see me again was expressed in her whole bearing.
"That remark silenced me. I flung at her a glance full of hatred, and
hurried away.
" 'You are killing yourself,' she said imploringly; 'you should go out
and see your friends----'
" 'Pauline, you were a true prophet; Foedora is killing me, I want to
die. My life is intolerable.'
" 'Is there only one woman in the world?' she asked, smiling. 'Why
make yourself so miserable in so short a life?'
" 'That woman is killing me,' I answered; 'I can neither despise her
nor forget her.'
" 'You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more
of her,' he said, laughing.
" 'I have often thought of it,' I replied; 'but though sometimes the
thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either
or both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design. The
countess is an admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not
every man is an Othello.'
" 'She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,' Rastignac
interrupted.
" 'I am mad,' I cried; 'I can feel the madness raging at times in my
brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot
grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have
carefully considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I
am not thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore,
but of my Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead. 'What to you say to
opium?'
" 'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to
me,' he went on, 'like all young men, I have pondered over suicide.
Which of us hasn't killed himself two or three times before he is
thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a
means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or
you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all
forms of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy?
Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are
lavish in all physical pleasures; is not that the small change for
opium? And the riot that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to
mortal combat with wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of
Clarence's must have had a pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we
sink gloriously under the table, is not that a periodical death by
drowning on a small scale? If we are picked up by the police and
stretched out on those chilly benches of theirs at the police-station,
do we not enjoy all the pleasures of the Morgue? For though we are not
blue and green, muddy and swollen corpses, on the other hand we have
the consciousness of the climax.
" 'Ah,' he went on, 'this protracted suicide has nothing in common
with the bankrupt grocer's demise. Tradespeople have brought the river
into disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors'
hearts. In your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you
wish to invent a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after
this manner, I will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of
everything. The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should marry,
had six toes on her left foot; I cannot possibly live with a woman who
has six toes! It would get about to a certainty, and then I should be
ridiculous. Her income was only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune
diminished in quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it; if we
begin an outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of luck,
perhaps!'
" 'You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not
so much as a minister.'
"I shuddered.
" 'You are going to launch out into what I call systematic
dissipation,' said he, noticing my scruples, 'and yet you are afraid
of a green table-cloth.'
" 'Listen to me,' I answered. 'I promised my father never to set foot
in a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel
an unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the
money and go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my
own affairs straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for
you.'
"That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come
across a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too
well, and his whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our
energy just as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my
Hotel de Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret
where I had led my scholar's temperate life, a life which would
perhaps have been a long and honorable one, and that I ought not to
have quitted for the fevered existence which had urged me to the brink
of a precipice. Pauline surprised me in this dejected attitude.
"I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and
added to it sufficient to pay for six months' rent in advance. She
watched me in some alarm.
" 'Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep
my room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of
November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed
packet of manuscript is the fair copy of my great work on "The
Will," ' I went on, pointing to a package. 'Will you deposit it in the
King's Library? And you may do as you wish with everything that is
left here.'
" 'I shall have no more lessons,' she said, pointing to the piano.
"I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair
brow of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth--a father's
or a brother's kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my
key in its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the
Rue de Cluny when I heard a woman's light footstep behind me.
" 'I have embroidered this purse for you,' Pauline said; 'will you
refuse even that?'
"By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline's
eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in
haste like people who fear the contagion of the plague.
"As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac's return, his room
seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to
enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus
resting on her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly
furniture of various kinds--love tokens, very likely--was scattered
about. Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair
into which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the
arms were gnashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit
of pomade and hair-oil from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor
and squalor were oddly mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere.
You might have thought of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of
lazzaroni about it. It was the room of a gambler or a mauvais sujet,
where the luxury exists for one individual, who leads the life of the
senses and does not trouble himself over inconsistencies.
"He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the
table; then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat
a victim; we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each
other blows fit to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of
the world contained in that hat.
" 'There is your share,' he said; 'go and bury yourself if you can.'
"Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that
you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the
best upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of
pleasures, at once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and
losing enormous sums, but only at friends' houses and in ballrooms;
never in gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of
my early days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through
quarrels or owing to the easy confidence established among those who
are going to the bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to
one another so tightly as our evil propensities.
"Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror,
and I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going
characters who are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can
barely conceive, it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor
appreciate its normal condition; but when will you instill poetry into
the provincial intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are
merely drugs to folk of that calibre.
"Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself,
that intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of
pleasure, this sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much
like those worthy bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new
opera by Rossini. Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame
of mind that leads an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because
the first one, forsooth, gave him the indigestion?
"Suppose that nature has endowed you with a feeble stomach or one of
limited capacity; you acquire a mastery over it and improve it; you
learn to carry your liquor; you grow accustomed to being drunk; you
pass whole nights without sleep; at last you acquire the constitution
of a colonel of cuirassiers; and in this way you create yourself
afresh, as if to fly in the face of Providence.
"A man transformed after this sort is like a neophyte who has at last
become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot and shell and his
legs to lengthy marches. When the monster's hold on him is still
uncertain, and it is not yet known which will have the better of it,
they roll over and over, alternately victor and vanquished, in a world
where everything is wonderful, where every ache of the soul is laid to
sleep, where only the shadows of ideas are revived.
"This furious struggle has already become a necessity for us. The
prodigal has struck a bargain for all the enjoyments with which life
teems abundantly, at the price of his own death, like the mythical
persons in legends who sold themselves to the devil for the power of
doing evil. For them, instead of flowing quietly on in its monotonous
course in the depths of some counting-house or study, life is poured
out in a boiling torrent.
"Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic's ecstasy is for
the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit
as strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours as full of rapture as
a young girl's dreams; you travel without fatigue; you chat pleasantly
with your friends; words come to you with a whole life in each, and
fresh pleasures without regrets; poems are set forth for you in a few
brief phrases. The coarse animal satisfaction, in which science has
tried to find a soul, is followed by the enchanted drowsiness that men
sigh for under the burden of consciousness. Is it not because they all
feel the need of absolute repose? Because Excess is a sort of toll
that genius pays to pain?
"All men and all things appear before you in the guise you choose, in
those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of all creation; you
transform it at your pleasure. And throughout this unceasing delirium,
Play may pour, at your will, its molten lead into your veins.
"Some day you will fall into the monster's power. Then you will have,
as I had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence sitting by your pillow.
Are you an old soldier? Phthisis attacks you. A diplomatist? An
aneurism hangs death in your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be
consumption that will cry out to me, 'Let us be going!' as to Raphael
of Urbino, in old time, killed by an excess of love.
"In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world too early
or too late. My energy would have been dangerous there, no doubt, if I
had not have squandered it in such ways as these. Was not the world
rid of an Alexander, by the cup of Hercules, at the close of a
drinking bout?
"There are some, the sport of Destiny, who must either have heaven or
hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now I
lacked the heart to moralize about those two," and he pointed to
Euphrasia and Aquilina. "They are types of my own personal history,
images of my life! I could scarcely reproach them; they stood before
me like judges.
"In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while my
distracting disorder was at its height, two crises supervened; each
brought me keen and abundant pangs. The first came a few days after I
had flung myself, like Sardanapalus, on my pyre. I met Foedora under
the peristyle of the Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages.
"That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the spiteful words
she murmured in the ear of her cicisbeo, telling him my history no
doubt, rating mine as a common love affair. She was deceived, yet she
was applauding her perspicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her,
must still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her
still when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and
know that I was a target for her scornful jests! Oh, that I should be
unable to tear the love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her
feet!
"At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly
they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them--they
were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing
tears and money upon you.
"At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought,
or while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my
friends, I might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of chestnut-
brown, with a shabby hat in his hand. This gentleman's appearance
would signify my debt, the bill I had drawn; the spectre would compel
me to leave the table to speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil me
of my cheerfulness, of my mistress, of all I possessed, down to my
very bedstead.
"Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into
the street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force us
into the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the
scaffold, where the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as
we pay the extreme penalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but
people will not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue.
"My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on
two feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying
umbrellas of various hues; you come face to face with him at the
corner of some street, in the midst of your mirth. These have the
detestable prerogative of saying, 'M. de Valentin owes me something,
and does not pay. I have a hold on him. He had better not show me any
offensive airs!' You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow
politely. 'When are you going to pay me?' say they. And you must lie,
and beg money of another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his
strong-box, and receive sour looks in return from these horse-leeches;
a blow would be less hateful; you must put up with their crass
ignorance and calculating morality. A debt is a feat of the
imaginative that they cannot appreciate. A borrower is often carried
away and over-mastered by generous impulses; nothing great, nothing
magnanimous can move or dominate those who live for money, and
recognize nothing but money. I myself held money in abhorrence.
"A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging
to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him. When I went to
his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the
dark office that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that
had laid hold upon me at the brink of my father's grave. I looked upon
this as an evil omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to
hear her voice. What power was it that made my own name ring vaguely
in my ears, in spite of the clamor of bells?
"The money paid down for my island, when all my debts were discharged,
left me in possession of two thousand francs. I could now have
returned to the scholar's tranquil life, it is true; I could have gone
back to my garret after having gained an experience of life, with my
head filled with the results of extensive observation, and with a
certain sort of reputation attaching to me. But Foedora's hold upon
her victim was not relaxed. We often met. I compelled her admirers to
sound my name in her ears, by dint of astonishing them with my
cleverness and success, with my horses and equipages. It all found her
impassive and uninterested; so did an ugly phrase of Rastignac's, 'He
is killing himself for you.'
"I charged the world at large with my revenge, but I was not happy.
While I was fathoming the miry depths of life, I only recognized the
more keenly at all times the happiness of reciprocal affection; it was
a shadow that I followed through all that befell me in my
extravagance, and in my wildest moments. It was my misfortune to be
deceived in my fairest beliefs, to be punished by ingratitude for
benefiting others, and to receive uncounted pleasures as the reward of
my errors--a sinister doctrine, but a true one for the prodigal!
"The devil take death!" he shouted, brandishing the skin; "I mean to
live! I am rich, I have every virtue; nothing will withstand me. Who
would not be generous, when everything is in his power? Aha! Aha! I
wished for two hundred thousand livres a year, and I shall have them.
Bow down before me, all of you, wallowing on the carpets like swine in
the mire! You all belong to me--a precious property truly! I am rich;
I could buy you all, even the deputy snoring over there. Scum of
society, give me your benediction! I am the Pope."
"Wake up!" Raphael shouted, beating Emile with the piece of shagreen
as if he meant to draw electric fluid out of it.
"I am a millionaire!"
"If you are not a millionaire, you are most certainly drunk."
"But, Raphael, we are in queer company, and you ought to keep quiet
for the sake of your own dignity."
"My life has been silent too long. I mean to have my revenge now on
the world at large. I will not amuse myself by squandering paltry
five-franc pieces; I will reproduce and sum up my epoch by absorbing
human lives, human minds, and human souls. There are the treasures of
pestilence--that is no paltry kind of wealth, is it? I will wrestle
with fevers--yellow, blue, or green--with whole armies, with gibbets.
I can possess Foedora--Yet no, I do not want Foedora; she is a
disease; I am dying of Foedora. I want to forget Foedora."
"If you keep on calling out like this, I shall take you into the
dining-room."
"Do you see this skin? It is Solomon's will. Solomon belongs to me--a
little varlet of a king! Arabia is mine, Arabia Petraea to boot; and
the universe, and you too, if I choose. If I choose-- Ah! be careful.
I can buy up all our journalist's shop; you shall be my valet. You
shall be my valet, you shall manage my newspaper. Valet! VALET, that
is to say, free from aches and pains, because he has no brains."
"Regard for you! You shall have Havana cigars, with this bit of
shagreen: always with this skin, this supreme bit of shagreen. It is a
cure for corns, and efficacious remedy. Do you suffer? I will remove
them."
"Yes, yes----"
"Yes."
"You don't believe me. I know you, my friend; you are as full of lies
as a new-made king."
"I will bet you I can prove it. Let us measure it----"
The two friends spread out the table-napkin and laid the Magic Skin
upon it. As Emile's hand appeared to be steadier than Raphael's, he
drew a line with pen and ink round the talisman, while his friend
said:
"Yes, my nursling of the press. You shall amuse me; you shall drive
the flies away from me. The friend of adversity should be the friend
of prosperity. So I will give you some Hava--na--cig----"
Very soon the snorings of the two friends were added to the music with
which the rooms resounded--an ineffectual concert! The lights went out
one by one, their crystal sconces cracking in the final flare. Night
threw dark shadows over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael's
narrative had been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, of
ideas for which words had often been lacking.
Towards noon, next day, the fair Aquilina bestirred herself. She
yawned wearily. She had slept with her head upon a painted velvet
footstool, and her cheeks were mottled over by contact with the
surface. Her movement awoke Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a
hoarse cry; her pretty face, that had been so fresh and fair in the
evening, was sallow now and pallid; she looked like a candidate for
the hospital. The rest awoke also by degrees, with portentous
groanings, to feel themselves over in every stiffened limb, and to
experience the infinite varieties of weariness that weighed upon them.
A servant came in to throw back the shutters and open the windows.
There they all stood, brought back to consciousness by the warm rays
of sunlight that shone upon the sleepers' heads. Their movements
during slumber had disordered the elaborately arranged hair and
toilettes of the women. They presented a ghastly spectacle in the
bright daylight. Their hair fell ungracefully about them; their eyes,
lately so brilliant, were heavy and dim; the expression of their faces
was entirely changed. The sickly hues, which daylight brings out so
strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had crept over the lymphatic
faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the dainty red lips were grown
pale and dry, and bore tokens of the degradation of excess. Each
disowned his mistress of the night before; the women looked wan and
discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession.
The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles
round them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and
stupefied with heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than
refreshing. There was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality
about these haggard faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn
of all the poetical illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even
these fearless champions, accustomed to measure themselves with
excess, were struck with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of
its disguises, at being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in
rags, lifeless and hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect
and the enchantments of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in
silence and with haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms
where everything had been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated
passions.
The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement
were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching
philosophy was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure
outer air was like virtue; in contrast with the heated atmosphere,
heavy with the fumes of the previous night of revelry.
An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its severe
beauty, and the graceful model who was waiting for him. A young man
recollected a lawsuit on which the fortunes of a family hung, and an
important transaction that needed his presence. The scholar regretted
his study and that noble work that called for him. Emile appeared just
then as smiling, blooming, and fresh as the smartest assistant in a
fashionable shop.
"You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won't be fit for anything
to-day, so this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast."
At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women went
languidly up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. Each one
shook herself. The wilder sort lectured the steadier ones. The
courtesans made fun of those who looked unable to continue the
boisterous festivity; but these wan forms revived all at once, stood
in groups, and talked and smiled. Some servants quickly and adroitly
set the furniture and everything else in its place, and a magnificent
breakfast was got ready.
"You have come here just at the right time," said the banker,
indicating the breakfast; "you can jot down the numbers, and initial
off all the dishes."
"Oh! Oh!"
"Ah! Ah!"
"Have you your certificate of birth about you," Cardot went on, "and
Mme. de Valentin's as well?"
"Very well then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of Major O'Flaharty,
who died in August 1828 at Calcutta."
Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked like a man
who has just received a blow. Acclamation took the form of silence,
for stifled envy had been the first feeling in every breast, and all
eyes devoured him like flames. Then a murmur rose, and grew like the
voice of a discontented audience, or the first mutterings of a riot,
as everybody made some comment on this news of great wealth brought by
the notary.
"Why, what is the matter with him?' Taillefer cried. "He comes by his
fortune very cheaply."
A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan features of the
heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every outline grew haggard; the
hollows in his livid countenance grew deeper, and his eyes were fixed
and staring. He was facing Death.
The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and faces with satiety
written on them, the enjoyment that had reached the pitch of agony,
was a living illustration of his own life.
Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively within the
merciless outlines on the table-napkin; he tried not to believe it,
but his incredulity vanished utterly before the light of an inner
presentiment. The whole world was his; he could have all things, but
the will to possess them was utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the
midst of the desert, with but a little water left to quench his
thirst, he must measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw
what every desire of his must cost him in the days of his life. He
believed in the powers of the Magic Skin at last, he listened to every
breath he drew; he felt ill already; he asked himself:
"Aha, Raphael! what fun you will have! What will you give me?" asked
Aquilina.
"A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style," said Emile.
The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but
he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed
him of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish
of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil,
living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing
in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of
a Sunday on the green sward, and understanding never a word of the
rector's sermon. The actual scene that lay before him, the gilded
furniture, the courtesans, the feast itself, and the surrounding
splendors, seemed to catch him by the throat and made him cough.
"Yes, there are," said Raphael; "they are their own executioners."
"Let us drink!" Raphael said, putting the talisman into his pocket.
"What are you doing?" said Emile, checking his movement. "Gentlemen,"
he added, addressing the company, who were rather taken aback by
Raphael's behavior, "you must know that our friend Valentin here--what
am I saying?--I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin--is in the possession
of a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as soon as
he knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he is a flunkey,
and devoid of all decent feeling."
"Indian shawls!"
"Pay my debts!"
"Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick!"
"Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I'll cry quits with you,
Raphael!"
These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets at the end
of a display of fireworks; and were uttered, perhaps, more in earnest
than in jest.
"My good friend," Emile said solemnly, "I shall be quite satisfied
with an income of two hundred thousand livres. Please to set about it
at once."
"A nice excuse!" the poet cried; "ought we not to sacrifice ourselves
for our friends?"
"I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead," Valentin made
answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.
"Dying people are frightfully cruel," said Emile, laughing. "You are
rich now," he went on gravely; "very well, I will give you two months
at most before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that
you cannot understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to
believe in your Magic Skin."
Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank
immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his
fatal power.
III
THE AGONY
In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age
pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling
rain. He peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the
address of the Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike
fashion, and with the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His
face plainly showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification
and an authoritative nature; his long, gray hair hung in disorder
about a face like a piece of parchment shriveling in the fire. If a
painter had come upon this curious character, he would, no doubt, have
transferred him to his sketchbook on his return, a thin, bony figure,
clad in black, and have inscribed beneath it: "Classical poet in
search of a rhyme." When he had identified the number that had been
given to him, this reincarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door
of a splendid mansion.
"Is Monsieur Raphael in?" the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in
livery.
"My Lord the Marquis sees nobody," said the servant, swallowing a huge
morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.
"Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy," said the
Swiss. "A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away.
If I were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I
should lose an income of six hundred francs."
When Raphael inherited his uncle's vast estate, his first care had
been to seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose affection he
knew that he was secure. Jonathan had wept tears of joy at the sight
of his young master, of whom he thought he had taken a final farewell;
and when the marquis exalted him to the high office of steward, his
happiness could not be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an
intermediary power between Raphael and the world at large. He was the
absolute disposer of his master's fortune, the blind instrument of an
unknown will, and a sixth sense, as it were, by which the emotions of
life were communicated to Raphael.
"I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir," said the elderly person
to Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some way, into a shelter from
the rain.
"To speak with my Lord the Marquis?" the steward cried. "He scarcely
speaks even to me, his foster-father!"
"But I am likewise his foster-father," said the old man. "If your wife
was his foster-mother, I fed him myself with the milk of the Muses. He
is my nursling, my child, carus alumnus! I formed his mind, cultivated
his understanding, developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to
my own honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men of
our epoch? He was one of my pupils in two lower forms, and in
rhetoric. I am his professor."
"My dear sir," Jonathan replied, "Heaven only knows what is the matter
with my master. You see, there are not a couple of houses like ours
anywhere in Paris. Do you understand? Not two houses. Faith, that
there are not. My Lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him;
it formerly belonged to a duke and a peer of France; then he spent
three hundred thousand francs over furnishing it. That's a good deal,
you know, three hundred thousand francs! But every room in the house
is a perfect wonder. 'Good,' said I to myself when I saw this
magnificence; 'it is just like it used to be in the time of my lord,
his late grandfather; and the young marquis is going to entertain all
Paris and the Court!' Nothing of the kind! My lord refused to see any
one whatever. 'Tis a funny life that he leads, M. Porriquet, you
understand. An inconciliable life. He rises every day at the same
time. I am the only person, you see, that may enter his room. I open
all the shutters at seven o'clock, summer or winter. It is all
arranged very oddly. As I come in I say to him:
"Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his dressing-
gown, and it is always after the same pattern, and of the same
material. I am obliged to replace it when it can be used no longer,
simply to save him the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer fancy!
As a matter of fact, he has a thousand francs to spend every day, and
he does as he pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of
him that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold out
the other to him! The most difficult things he will tell me to do, and
yet I do them, you know! He gives me a lot of trifles to attend to,
that I am well set to work! He reads the newspapers, doesn't he? Well,
my instructions are to put them always in the same place, on the same
table. I always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don't I
tremble! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand crowns that
he is to come into after my lord's death, if breakfast is not served
inconciliably at ten o'clock precisely. The menus are drawn up for the
whole year round, day after day. My Lord the Marquis has not a thing
to wish for. He has strawberries whenever there are any, and he has
the earliest mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed
every morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next place, he
dresses himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, the same linen,
that I always put on the same chair, you understand? I have to see
that he always has the same cloth; and if it should happen that his
coat came to grief (a mere supposition), I should have to replace it
by another without saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go
in and say to my master:
The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its
tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He had
let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold
mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber
mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the
enameled coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to
draw out its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction
between the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes,
where all his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence
seemed to look out from them and to grasp everything at once.
That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in
it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the
inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its
desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in
imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him,
while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus,
of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the
strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-
four hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look that
Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold at
the gaming-table only a few months ago.
He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely common-
sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had
scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order to
live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a
wish; and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The
better to struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had
followed Origen's example, and had maimed and chastened his
imagination.
The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his
sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary's house. A
well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how a
Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself. The man had never
spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six
breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house,
adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet. "I will
be like that man," thought Raphael to himself. He wanted life at any
price, and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the
luxury around him.
The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there
seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the
Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly
recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom
he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general
preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would
have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find
Childe Harold.
"I am very well," replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that
feverish hand. "But how about you?"
Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant
circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual
to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but
just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly
suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin.
It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material,
surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic
outlines. Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least
whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the
terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must
live without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with
the old schoolmaster's prolixity.
"Well, my dear pere Porriquet," he said, not very certain what the
question was to which he was replying, "but I can do nothing for you,
nothing at all. I WISH VERY HEARTILY that you may succeed----"
All at once, without seeing the change wrought on the old man's sallow
and wrinkled brow by these conventional phrases, full of indifference
and selfishness, Raphael sprang to his feet like a startled roebuck.
He saw a thin white line between the black piece of hide and the red
tracing about it, and gave a cry so fearful that the poor professor
was frightened by it.
Jonathan appeared.
Raphael's face was white with anger; a slight froth marked his
trembling lips; there was a savage gleam in his eyes. The two elders
shook with terror in his presence like two children at the sight of a
snake. The young man fell back in his armchair, a kind of reaction
took place in him, the tears flowed fast from his angry eyes.
"Oh, my life!" he cried, "that fair life of mine. Never to know a
kindly thought again, to love no more; nothing is left to me!"
"Now attend to me, Jonathan," said the young man to his old servant.
"Try to understand the charge confided to you."
"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping the drops of
perspiration from his wrinkled forehead. "But if you don't wish to see
pretty women, how will you manage at the Italiens this evening? An
English family is returning to London, and I have taken their box for
the rest of the season, and it is in a splendid position--superb; in
the first row.
But when the greenroom of the Italiens returned upon his sight he
beheld, not the Virgin, but a very handsome young person. The
execrable Euphrasia, in all the splendor of her toilette, with its
orient pearls, had come thither, impatient for her ardent, elderly
admirer. She was insolently exhibiting herself with her defiant face
and glittering eyes to an envious crowd of stockbrokers, a visible
testimony to the inexhaustible wealth that the old dealer permitted
her to squander.
Raphael recollected the mocking wish with which he had accepted the
old man's luckless gift, and tasted all the sweets of revenge when he
beheld the spectacle of sublime wisdom fallen to such a depth as this,
wisdom for which such humiliation had seemed a thing impossible. The
centenarian greeted Euphrasia with a ghastly smile, receiving her
honeyed words in reply. He offered her his emaciated arm, and went
twice or thrice round the greenroom with her; the envious glances and
compliments with which the crowd received his mistress delighted him;
he did not see the scornful smiles, nor hear the caustic comments to
which he gave rise.
"In what cemetery did this young ghoul unearth that corpse of hers?"
asked a dandy of the Romantic faction.
The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom to take
their places again. Raphael and the old merchant separated. As he
entered his box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting exactly opposite to
him on the other side of the theatre. The Countess had probably only
just come, for she was just flinging off her scarf to leave her throat
uncovered, and was occupied with going through all the indescribable
manoeuvres of a coquette arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon
her. A young peer of France had come with her; she asked him for the
lorgnette she had given him to carry. Raphael knew the despotism to
which his successor had resigned himself, in her gestures, and in the
way she treated her companion. He was also under the spell no doubt,
another dupe beating with all the might of a real affection against
the woman's cold calculations, enduring all the tortures from which
Valentin had luckily freed himself.
All at once she met Raphael's steady gaze and turned pale, aghast at
the intolerable contempt in her rejected lover's eyes. Not one of her
exiled suitors had failed to own her power over them; Valentin alone
was proof against her attractions. A power that can be defied with
impunity is drawing to its end. This axiom is as deeply engraved on
the heart of woman as in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore,
Foedora saw the deathblow of her influence and her ability to please.
An epigram of his, made at the Opera the day before, was already known
in the salons of Paris. The biting edge of that terrible speech had
already given the Countess an incurable wound. We know how to
cauterize a wound, but we know of no treatment as yet for the stab of
a phrase. As every other woman in the house looked by turns at her and
at the Marquis, Foedora would have consigned them all to the
oubliettes of some Bastille; for in spite of her capacity for
dissimulation, her discomfiture was discerned by her rivals. Her
unfailing consolation had slipped from her at last. The delicious
thought, "I am the most beautiful," the thought that at all times had
soothed every mortification, had turned into a lie.
At the opening of the second act a woman took up her position not very
far from Raphael, in a box that had been empty hitherto. A murmur of
admiration went up from the whole house. In that sea of human faces
there was a movement of every living wave; all eyes were turned upon
the stranger lady. The applause of young and old was so prolonged,
that when the orchestra began, the musicians turned to the audience to
request silence, and then they themselves joined in the plaudits and
swelled the confusion. Excited talk began in every box, every woman
equipped herself with an opera glass, elderly men grew young again,
and polished the glasses of their lorgnettes with their gloves. The
enthusiasm subsided by degrees, the stage echoed with the voices of
the singers, and order reigned as before. The aristocratic section,
ashamed of having yielded to a spontaneous feeling, again assumed
their wonted politely frigid manner. The well-to-do dislike to be
astonished at anything; at the first sight of a beautiful thing it
becomes their duty to discover the defect in it which absolves them
from admiring it,--the feeling of all ordinary minds. Yet a few still
remained motionless and heedless of the music, artlessly absorbed in
the delight of watching Raphael's neighbor.
Raphael's life depended upon a covenant that he had made with himself,
and had hitherto kept sacred. He would give no special heed to any
woman whatever; and the better to guard against temptation, he used a
cunningly contrived opera-glass which destroyed the harmony of the
fairest features by hideous distortions. He had not recovered from the
terror that had seized on him in the morning when, at a mere
expression of civility, the Magic Skin had contracted so abruptly. So
Raphael was determined not to turn his face in the direction of his
neighbor. He sat imperturbable as a duchess with his back against the
corner of the box, thereby shutting out half of his neighbor's view of
the stage, appearing to disregard her, and even to be unaware that a
pretty woman sat there just behind him.
His neighbor copied Valentin's position exactly; she leaned her elbow
on the edge of her box and turned her face in three-quarter profile
upon the singers on the stage, as if she were sitting to a painter.
These two people looked like two estranged lovers still sulking, still
turning their backs upon each other, who will go into each other's
arms at the first tender word.
Now and again his neighbor's ostrich feathers or her hair came in
contact with Raphael's head, giving him a pleasurable thrill, against
which he sternly fought. In a little while he felt the touch of the
soft frill of lace that went round her dress; he could hear the
gracious sounds of the folds of her dress itself, light rustling
noises full of enchantment; he could even feel her movements as she
breathed; with the gentle stir thus imparted to her form and to her
draperies, it seemed to Raphael that all her being was suddenly
communicated to him in an electric spark. The lace and tulle that
caressed him imparted the delicious warmth of her bare, white
shoulders. By a freak in the ordering of things, these two creatures,
kept apart by social conventions, with the abysses of death between
them, breathed together and perhaps thought of one another. Finally,
the subtle perfume of aloes completed the work of Raphael's
intoxication. Opposition heated his imagination, and his fancy, become
the wilder for the limits imposed upon it, sketched a woman for him in
outlines of fire. He turned abruptly, the stranger made a similar
movement, startled no doubt at being brought in contact with a
stranger; and they remained face to face, each with the same thought.
"Pauline!"
"M. Raphael!"
"I want Pauline to love me!" he cried next morning, looking at the
talisman the while in unspeakable anguish.
The skin did not move in the least; it seemed to have lost its power
to shrink; doubtless it could not fulfil a wish fulfilled already.
He dressed himself as simply as had formerly been his wont, and set
out on foot for his old lodging, trying to go back in fancy to the
happy days when he abandoned himself without peril to vehement
desires, the days when he had not yet condemned all human enjoyment.
As he walked he beheld Pauline--not the Pauline of the Hotel Saint-
Quentin, but the Pauline of last evening. Here was the accomplished
mistress he had so often dreamed of, the intelligent young girl with
the loving nature and artistic temperament, who understood poets, who
understood poetry, and lived in luxurious surroundings. Here, in
short, was Foedora, gifted with a great soul; or Pauline become a
countess, and twice a millionaire, as Foedora had been. When he
reached the worn threshold, and stood upon the broken step at the
door, where in the old days he had had so many desperate thoughts, an
old woman came out of the room within and spoke to him.
"You know your old room then," she replied; "you are expected up
there."
"Oh no, sir. Mme. Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives in a fine house
of her own on the other side of the river. Her husband has come back.
My goodness, he brought back thousands and thousands. They say she
could buy up all the Quartier Saint-Jacques if she liked. She gave me
her basement room for nothing, and the remainder of her lease. Ah,
she's a kind woman all the same; she is no more proud to-day than she
was yesterday."
"Ah, there you are!" cried Pauline, turning her head, and rising with
unconcealed delight.
"Why did you leave us then?" she asked, dropping her eyes as the flush
deepened on his face. "What became of you?"
"Alas!" she said, filled with pitying tenderness. "I guessed your fate
yesterday when I saw you so well dressed, and apparently so wealthy;
but in reality? Eh, M. Raphael, is it as it always used to be with
you?"
Valentin could not restrain the tears that sprang to his eyes.
Raphael felt himself unable to say one word; he bent his head. The
young girl took his hand at this; she pressed it as she said, half
sobbing and half laughing:--
"Rich, rich, happy and rich! Your Pauline is rich. But I? Oh, I ought
to be very poor to-day. I have said, times without number, that I
would give all the wealth upon this earth for those words, 'He loves
me!' O my Raphael! I have millions. You like luxury, you will be glad;
but you must love me and my heart besides, for there is so much love
for you in my heart. You don't know? My father has come back. I am a
wealthy heiress. Both he and my mother leave me completely free to
decide my own fate. I am free--do you understand?"
"Ah, I will not leave you any more," said Pauline, falling back in her
chair. "I do not know how I come to be so bold!" she added, blushing.
"Bold, my Pauline? Do not fear it. It is love, love true and deep and
everlasting like my own, is it not?"
"Speak!" she cried. "Go on speaking, so long your lips have been dumb
for me."
"Then you have loved me all along?"
"Loved you? MON DIEU! How often I have wept here, setting your room
straight, and grieving for your poverty and my own. I would have sold
myself to the evil one to spare you one vexation! You are MY Raphael
to-day, really my own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and
your heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart--O wealth
inexhaustible! Well, where was I?" she went on after a pause. "Oh yes!
We have three, four, or five millions, I believe. If I were poor, I
should perhaps desire to bear your name, to be acknowledged as your
wife; but as it is, I would give up the whole world for you, I would
be your servant still, now and always. Why, Raphael, if I give you my
fortune, my heart, myself to-day, I do no more than I did that day
when I put a certain five-franc piece in the drawer there," and she
pointed to the table. "Oh, how your exultation hurt me then!"
"Oh, why are you rich?" Raphael cried; "why is there no vanity in you?
I can do nothing for you."
"When you are the Marquise de Valentin, I know that the title and the
fortune for thee, heavenly soul, will not be worth----"
"I have millions too. But what is wealth to either of us now? There is
my life--ah, that I can offer, take it."
"Your love, Raphael, your love is all the world to me. Are your
thoughts of me? I am the happiest of the happy!"
She sprang upon his knees and clasped her arms about his neck.
"Kiss me!" she cried, "after all the pain you have given me; to blot
out the memory of the grief that your joys have caused me; and for the
sake of the nights that I spent in painting hand-screens----"
"Now that we are rich, my darling, I can tell you all about it. Poor
boy! how easy it is to delude a clever man! Could you have had white
waistcoats and clean shirts twice a week for three francs every month
to the laundress? Why, you used to drink twice as much milk as your
money would have paid for. I deceived you all round--over firing, oil,
and even money. O Raphael mine, don't have me for your wife, I am far
too cunning!" she said laughing.
"I used to work till two o'clock in the morning; I gave my mother half
the money made by my screens, and the other half went to you."
They looked at one another for a moment, both bewildered by love and
gladness.
"Some day we shall have to pay for this happiness by some terrible
sorrow," cried Raphael.
"Perhaps you are married?" said Pauline. "Oh, I will not give you up
to any other woman."
She slipped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and looked at
Raphael in an enthusiasm of devotion.
"I am afraid I shall go mad. How handsome you are!" she went on,
passing her fingers through her lover's fair hair. "How stupid your
Countess Foedora is! How pleased I was yesterday with the homage they
all paid to me! SHE has never been applauded. Dear, when I felt your
arm against my back, I heard a vague voice within me that cried, 'He
is there!' and I turned round and saw you. I fled, for I longed so to
throw my arms about you before them all."
"How happy you are--you can speak!" Raphael exclaimed. "My heart is
overwhelmed; I would weep, but I cannot. Do not draw your hand away. I
could stay here looking at you like this for the rest of my life, I
think; happy and content."
"Ah, what are words?" answered Valentin, letting a hot tear fall on
Pauline's hands. "Some time I will try to tell you of my love; just
now I can only feel it."
"You," she said, "with your lofty soul and your great genius, with
that heart of yours that I know so well; are you really mine, as I am
yours?"
"Death may come when it will," said Pauline in ecstasy; "I have
lived!"
Happy he who shall divine their joy, for he must have experienced it.
"I wish that no one might enter this dear garret again, my Raphael,"
said Pauline, after two hours of silence.
"We must have the door walled up, put bars across the window, and buy
the house," the Marquis answered.
"Yes, we will," she said. Then a moment later she added: "Our search
for your manuscripts has been a little lost sight of," and they both
laughed like children.
"Pshaw! I don't care a jot for the whole circle of the sciences,"
Raphael answered.
"You used to be very miserable as you made these little scratches and
scrawls," she said, turning the papers over.
"My Pauline----"
"What a long way apart we shall be until----" She stopped, and looked
at her lover with a mischievous and coquettish expression.
"I am an unnatural daughter!" she went on. "I give no more thought to
my father or my mother, or to anything in the world. Poor love, you
don't know that my father is very ill? He returned from the Indies in
very bad health. He nearly died at Havre, where we went to find him.
Good heavens!" she cried, looking at her watch; "it is three o'clock
already! I ought to be back again when he wakes at four. I am mistress
of the house at home; my mother does everything that I wish, and my
father worships me; but I will not abuse their kindness, that would be
wrong. My poor father! He would have me go to the Italiens yesterday.
You will come to see him to-morrow, will you not?"
"I am going to take the key of this room away with me," she said.
"Isn't our treasure-house a palace?"
"A thousand, MON DIEU!" she said, looking at Raphael. "Will it always
be like this? I feel as if I were dreaming."
They went slowly down the stairs together, step for step, with arms
closely linked, trembling both of them beneath their load of joy. Each
pressing close to the other's side, like a pair of doves, they reached
the Place de la Sorbonne, where Pauline's carriage was waiting.
"I want to go home with you," she said. "I want to see your own room
and your study, and to sit at the table where you work. It will be
like old times," she said, blushing.
"How glad I am to have seen all this for myself!" Pauline cried,
creasing the silken bed-curtains in Raphael's room between her
fingers. "As I go to sleep, I shall be here in thought. I shall
imagine your dear head on the pillow there. Raphael, tell me, did no
one advise you about the furniture of your hotel?"
"Pauline!"
"Oh, I know I am fearfully jealous. You have good taste. I will have a
bed like yours to-morrow."
"I will take you back to him," cried Valentin, "for I want to be away
from you as little as possible."
When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, thinking over the
sudden and complete way in which his wishes had been fulfilled, a cold
shiver went through him, as if the blade of a dagger had been plunged
into his breast--he thought of the Magic Skin, and saw that it had
shrunk a little. He uttered the most tremendous of French oaths,
without any of the Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of
Andouillettes, leant his head against the back of the chair, and sat
motionless, fixing his unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain
pole.
He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung the
talisman down a well.
"Vogue la galere," cried he. "The devil take all this nonsense."
Wealthy as they both were, they had not a caprice which they could not
gratify, and for that reason had no caprices. A refined taste, a
feeling for beauty and poetry, was instinct in the soul of the bride;
her lover's smile was more to her than all the pearls of Ormuz. She
disdained feminine finery; a muslin dress and flowers formed her most
elaborate toilette.
Pauline and Raphael shunned every one else, for solitude was
abundantly beautiful to them. The idlers at the Opera, or at the
Italiens, saw this charming and unconventional pair evening after
evening. Some gossip went the round of the salons at first, but the
harmless lovers were soon forgotten in the course of events which took
place in Paris; their marriage was announced at length to excuse them
in the eyes of the prudish; and as it happened, their servants did not
babble; so their bliss did not draw down upon them any very severe
punishment.
One morning towards the end of February, at the time when the
brightening days bring a belief in the nearness of the joys of spring,
Pauline and Raphael were breakfasting together in a small
conservatory, a kind of drawing-room filled with flowers, on a level
with the garden. The mild rays of the pale winter sunlight, breaking
through the thicket of exotic plants, warmed the air somewhat. The
vivid contrast made by the varieties of foliage, the colors of the
masses of flowering shrubs, the freaks of light and shadow, gladdened
the eyes. While all the rest of Paris still sought warmth from its
melancholy hearth, these two were laughing in a bower of camellias,
lilacs, and blossoming heath. Their happy faces rose above lilies of
the valley, narcissus blooms, and Bengal roses. A mat of plaited
African grass, variegated like a carpet, lay beneath their feet in
this luxurious conservatory. The walls, covered with a green linen
material, bore no traces of damp. The surfaces of the rustic wooden
furniture shone with cleanliness. A kitten, attracted by the odor of
milk, had established itself upon the table; it allowed Pauline to
bedabble it in coffee; she was playing merrily with it, taking away
the cream that she had just allowed the kitten to sniff at, so as to
exercise its patience, and keep up the contest. She burst out laughing
at every antic, and by the comical remarks she constantly made, she
hindered Raphael from perusing the paper; he had dropped it a dozen
times already. This morning picture seemed to overflow with
inexpressible gladness, like everything that is natural and genuine.
"I am quite jealous of the paper," she said, as she wiped away the
tears that her childlike merriment had brought into her eyes. "Now, is
it not a heinous offence," she went on, as she became a woman all at
once, "to read Russian proclamations in my presence, and to attend to
the prosings of the Emperor Nicholas rather than to looks and words of
love!"
Just then the gravel walk outside the conservatory rang with the sound
of the gardener's heavily nailed boots.
"What is the matter with you, my angel; you are growing quite white!"
Pauline cried.
"Your voice frightens me," the girl went on; "it is so strangely
altered. What is it? How are you feeling? Where is the pain? You are
in pain!--Jonathan! here! call a doctor!" she cried.
Pauline flew upon the innocent plant, seized it by the stalk, and
flung it out into the garden; then, with all the might of the love
between them, she clasped Raphael in a close embrace, and with
languishing coquetry raised her red lips to his for a kiss.
"Dear angel," she cried, "when I saw you turn so white, I understood
that I could not live on without you; your life is my life too. Lay
your hand on my back, Raphael mine; I feel a chill like death. The
feeling of cold is there yet. Your lips are burning. How is your hand?
--Cold as ice," she added.
"How changed your voice is!" cried Pauline, as she dropped the fatal
symbol of destiny.
"So!" cried Raphael, when he was alone. "In an enlightened age, when
we have found out that diamonds are a crystallized form of charcoal,
at a time when everything is made clear, when the police would hale a
new Messiah before the magistrates, and submit his miracles to the
Academie des Sciences--in an epoch when we no longer believe in
anything but a notary's signature--that I, forsooth, should believe in
a sort of Mene, Tekel, Upharsin! No, by Heaven, I will not believe
that the Supreme Being would take pleasure in torturing a harmless
creature.--Let us see the learned about it."
Between the Halle des Vins, with its extensive assembly of barrels,
and the Salpetriere, that extensive seminary of drunkenness, lies a
small pond, which Raphael soon reached. All sorts of ducks of rare
varieties were there disporting themselves; their colored markings
shone in the sun like the glass in cathedral windows. Every kind of
duck in the world was represented, quacking, dabbling, and moving
about--a kind of parliament of ducks assembled against its will, but
luckily without either charter or political principles, living in
complete immunity from sportsmen, under the eyes of any naturalist
that chanced to see them.
"That is M. Lavrille," said one of the keepers to Raphael, who had
asked for that high priest of zoology.
"Oh, we are well off for ducks," the naturalist replied. "The genus,
moreover, as you doubtless know, is the most prolific in the order of
palmipeds. It begins with the swan and ends with the zin-zin duck,
comprising in all one hundred and thirty-seven very distinct
varieties, each having its own name, habits, country, and character,
and every one no more like another than a white man is like a negro.
Really, sir, when we dine off a duck, we have no notion for the most
part of the vast extent----"
"There you see the cravatted swan, a poor native of Canada; he has
come a very long way to show us his brown and gray plumage and his
little black cravat! Look, he is preening himself. That one is the
famous eider duck that provides the down, the eider-down under which
our fine ladies sleep; isn't it pretty? Who would not admire the
little pinkish white breast and the green beak? I have just been a
witness, sir," he went on, "to a marriage that I had long despaired of
bringing about; they have paired rather auspiciously, and I shall
await the results very eagerly. This will be a hundred and thirty-
eighth species, I flatter myself, to which, perhaps, my name will be
given. That is the newly matched pair," he said, pointing out two of
the ducks; "one of them is a laughing goose (anas albifrons), and the
other the great whistling duck, Buffon's anas ruffina. I have
hesitated a long while between the whistling duck, the duck with white
eyebrows, and the shoveler duck (anas clypeata). Stay, that is the
shoveler--that fat, brownish black rascal, with the greenish neck and
that coquettish iridescence on it. But the whistling duck was a
crested one, sir, and you will understand that I deliberated no
longer. We only lack the variegated black-capped duck now. These
gentlemen here, unanimously claim that that variety of duck is only a
repetition of the curve-beaked teal, but for my own part,"--and the
gesture he made was worth seeing. It expressed at once the modesty and
pride of a man of science; the pride full of obstinacy, and the
modesty well tempered with assurance.
"I don't think it is," he added. "You see, my dear sir, that we are
not amusing ourselves here. I am engaged at this moment upon a
monograph on the genus duck. But I am at your disposal."
While they went towards a rather pleasant house in the Rue du Buffon,
Raphael submitted the skin to M. Lavrille's inspection.
"I know the product," said the man of science, when he had turned his
magnifying glass upon the talisman. "It used to be used for covering
boxes. The shagreen is very old. They prefer to use skate's skin
nowadays for making sheaths. This, as you are doubtless aware, is the
hide of the raja sephen, a Red Sea fish."
"This," replied the man of science, as he flung himself down into his
armchair, "is an ass' skin, sir."
"I thank you, sir, for the information that you have given me; it
would furnish an admirable footnote for some Dom Calmet or other, if
such erudite hermits yet exist; but I have had the honor of pointing
out to you that this scrap was in the first instance quite as large as
that map," said Raphael, indicating an open atlas to Lavrille; "but it
has shrunk visibly in three months' time----"
"Quite so," said the man of science. "I understand. The remains of any
substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of
decay. It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably,
for engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between
great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The
field of science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that
we do not claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature."
"Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir," Raphael began,
half embarrassed, "but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is
subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be
stretched?"
"Ah, sir, you are the preserver of my life," and Raphael took leave of
the learned naturalist and hurried off to Planchette, leaving the
worthy Lavrille in his study, all among the bottles and dried plants
that filled it up.
Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from this visit, all
of science that man can grasp, a terminology to wit. Lavrille, the
worthy man, was very much like Sancho Panza giving to Don Quixote the
history of the goats; he was entertaining himself by making out a list
of animals and ticking them off. Even now that his life was nearing
its end, he was scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the
countless numbers of the great tribes that God has scattered, for some
unknown end, throughout the ocean of worlds.
Raphael was well pleased. "I shall keep my ass well in hand," cried
he. Sterne had said before his day, "Let us take care of our ass, if
we wish to live to old age." But it is such a fantastic brute!
The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like
some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in
upon him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a
sun-dial, and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had
received neither pension nor decoration; he had not known how to make
the right use of his ability for calculation. He was happy in his life
spent on the watch for a discovery; he had no thought either of
reputation, of the outer world, nor even of himself, and led the life
of science for the sake of science.
"Although my credulity must amuse you, sir," so the Marquis ended, "I
will conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed
with an insuperable power of resistance."
"You see this ball," he went on; "here it lies upon this slab. Now, it
is over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place, so
natural from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral?
Movement, locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks
underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the
whole of our science for all that. Our machines either make direct use
of this agency, this fact, or they convert it. This trifling
phenomenon, applied to large masses, would send Paris flying. We can
increase speed by an expenditure of force, and augment the force by an
increase of speed. But what are speed and force? Our science is as
powerless to tell us that as to create motion. Any movement whatever
is an immense power, and man does not create power of any kind.
Everything is movement, thought itself is a movement, upon movement
nature is based. Death is a movement whose limitations are little
known. If God is eternal, be sure that He moves perpetually; perhaps
God is movement. That is why movement, like God is inexplicable,
unfathomable, unlimited, incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever
touched, comprehended, or measured movement? We feel its effects
without seeing it; we can even deny them as we can deny the existence
of a God. Where is it? Where is it not? Whence comes it? What is its
source? What is its end? It surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet
escapes us. It is evident as a fact, obscure as an abstraction; it is
at once effect and cause. It requires space, even as we, and what is
space? Movement alone recalls it to us; without movement, space is but
an empty meaningless word. Like space, like creation, like the
infinite, movement is an insoluble problem which confounds human
reason; man will never conceive it, whatever else he may be permitted
to conceive.
"I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to expand the skin
indefinitely," began Raphael, quite of out patience.
"Bring about that result, sir," Raphael cried, "and you will have
earned millions."
"Then I should rob you of your money," replied the other, phlegmatic
as a Dutchman. "I am going to show you, in a word or two, that a
machine can be made that is fit to crush Providence itself in pieces
like a fly. It would reduce a man to the conditions of a piece of
waste paper; a man--boots and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and
gold, and all----"
"Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese ought to
make them useful in this way," the man of science went on, without
reflecting on the regard man has for his progeny.
"Yes, sir."
"Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger
than the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid.
Here, I am taking the funnel away----"
"Granted."
"But there is this difference," the other went on. "Suppose that the
thin column of water poured into the little vertical tube there exerts
a force equal, say, to a pound weight, for instance, its action will
be punctually communicated to the great body of the liquid, and will
be transmitted to every part of the surface represented by the water
in the flower-pot so that at the surface there will be a thousand
columns of water, every one pressing upwards as if they were impelled
by a force equal to that which compels the liquid to descend in the
vertical tube; and of necessity they reproduce here," said Planchette,
indicating to Raphael the top of the flower-pot, "the force introduced
over there, a thousand-fold," and the man of science pointed out to
the marquis the upright wooden pipe set in the clay.
"He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor
more beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of
expansion possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into being.
But water will only expand up to a certain point, while its
incompressibility, being a force in a manner negative, is, of
necessity, infinite."
"If this skin is expanded," said Raphael, "I promise you to erect a
colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred
thousand francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the
grandest problem of mechanical science effected during the interval;
to find dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally
to build an asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane
mathematicians."
The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette,
and together they set out for the Rue de la Sante--auspicious
appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter's, the young man found himself in
a vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and
roaring furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an
ocean of pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a
sea of melted metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings
filled your throat. There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were
covered with it; everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a
living organism; it became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself
intelligently after every fashion, to obey the worker's every caprice.
Through the uproar made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling
hammers, and the shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the
steel, Raphael passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was
able to inspect at his leisure the great press that Planchette had
told him about. He admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call
them, and the twin bars of steel coupled together with indestructible
bolts.
"If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank," said
Spieghalter, pointing out a beam of polished steel, "you would make a
steel bar spurt out in thousands of jets, that would get into your
legs like needles."
Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates
of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a
scientific conviction, he worked the crank energetically.
A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in the
machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of
incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old
furnace, which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a
waterspout.
The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the
glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they
all awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael,
Spieghalter, and Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy
expectant crowd. Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron
filings, white eyes, greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests,
could have fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal world
of German ballad poetry. After the skin had been in the fire for ten
minutes, the foreman pulled it out with a pair of pincers.
The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis readily handled
it; it was cool and flexible between his fingers. An exclamation of
alarm went up; the workmen fled in terror. Valentin was left alone
with Planchette in the empty workshop.
Valentin urged his horse into a rapid trot, hoping to find the
chemist, the celebrated Japhet, in his laboratory.
"Since you cannot invent substances," said Raphael, "you are obliged
to fall back on inventing names."
"Let's see! let's have a look at it!" cried the delighted chemist; "it
may, perhaps, be a fresh element."
"I am not joking," the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin
before him.
Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he
had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After
several experiments, he remarked:
"It is not shagreen at all!" the chemist cried. "We will treat this
unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a
crucible where I have at this moment some red potash."
Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.
The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to
break it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the
influence of a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science
wotted of fell harmless on the dreadful talisman.
"It is all over with me," Raphael wailed. "It is the finger of God! I
shall die!----" and he left the two amazed scientific men.
"We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the
Academie; our colleagues there would laugh at us," Planchette remarked
to the chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other
without daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked
like two Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in
the heavens. Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water;
red potash had been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric
shock had been a couple of playthings.
"I believe in the devil," said the Baron Japhet, after a moment's
silence.
They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle
is nothing more than a phenomenon.
Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with
anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted
and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man
brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily
believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter's apparatus; he had not
been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire;
but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its
stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had been
brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The
incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.
"I am mad," he muttered. "I have had no food since the morning, and
yet I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast
that burns me."
He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but
lately, drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the
talisman, and seated himself in his armchair.
He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with his
left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and
consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.
"O Pauline!" he cried. "Poor child! there are gulfs that love can
never traverse, despite the strength of his wings."
Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one
of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline's
breathing.
A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards
"I cajoled Jonathan," said she. "Doesn't the bed belong to me, to me
who am your wife? Don't scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise
you, to sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak."
She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her
lawn raiment, and sat down on Raphael's knee.
"Love, what gulf were you talking about?" she said, with an anxious
expression apparent upon her face.
"Death."
"You hurt me," she answered. "There are some thoughts upon which we,
poor women that we are, cannot dwell; they are death to us. Is it
strength of love in us, or lack of courage? I cannot tell. Death does
not frighten me," she began again, laughingly. "To die with you, both
together, to-morrow morning, in one last embrace, would be joy. It
seems to me that even then I should have lived more than a hundred
years. What does the number of days matter if we have spent a whole
lifetime of peace and love in one night, in one hour?"
"You are right; Heaven is speaking through that pretty mouth of yours.
Grant that I may kiss you, and let us die," said Raphael.
Towards nine o'clock in the morning the daylight streamed through the
chinks of the window shutters. Obscured somewhat by the muslin
curtains, it yet sufficed to show clearly the rich colors of the
carpet, the silks and furniture of the room, where the two lovers were
lying asleep. The gilding sparkled here and there. A ray of sunshine
fell and faded upon the soft down quilt that the freaks of live had
thrown to the ground. The outlines of Pauline's dress, hanging from a
cheval glass, appeared like a shadowy ghost. Her dainty shoes had been
left at a distance from the bed. A nightingale came to perch upon the
sill; its trills repeated over again, and the sounds of its wings
suddenly shaken out for flight, awoke Raphael.
He gazed at his sleeping wife. She had stretched her head out to him,
expressing in this way even while she slept the anxious tenderness of
love. Pauline seemed to look at him as she lay with her face turned
towards him in an attitude as full of grace as a young child's, with
her pretty, half-opened mouth held out towards him, as she drew her
light, even breath. Her little pearly teeth seemed to heighten the
redness of the fresh lips with the smile hovering over them. The red
glow in her complexion was brighter, and its whiteness was, so to
speak, whiter still just then than in the most impassioned moments of
the waking day. In her unconstrained grace, as she lay, so full of
believing trust, the adorable attractions of childhood were added to
the enchantments of love.
Even the most unaffected women still obey certain social conventions,
which restrain the free expansion of the soul within them during their
waking hours; but slumber seems to give them back the spontaneity of
life which makes infancy lovely. Pauline blushed for nothing; she was
like one of those beloved and heavenly beings, in whom reason has not
yet put motives into their actions and mystery into their glances. Her
profile stood out in sharp relief against the fine cambric of the
pillows; there was a certain sprightliness about her loose hair in
confusion, mingled with the deep lace ruffles; but she was sleeping in
happiness, her long lashes were tightly pressed against her cheeks, as
if to secure her eyes from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of
her soul to recollect and to hold fast a bliss that had been perfect
but fleeting. Her tiny pink and white ear, framed by a lock of her
hair and outlined by a wrapping of Mechlin lace, would have made an
artist, a painter, an old man, wildly in love, and would perhaps have
restored a madman to his senses.
In this softened mood Raphael's eyes wandered over the room, now
filled with memories and love, and where the very daylight seemed to
take delightful hues. Then he turned his gaze at last upon the
outlines of the woman's form, upon youth and purity, and love that
even now had no thought that was not for him alone, above all things,
and longed to live for ever. As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own
opened at once as if a ray of sunlight had lighted on them.
"Good-morning," she said, smiling. "How handsome you are, bad man!"
The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their
faces, making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all
that belongs only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity
and artlessness are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love's
springtide joys, like our own youthful laughter, must even take
flight, and live for us no longer save in memory; either for our
despair, or to shed some soothing fragrance over us, according to the
bent of our inmost thoughts.
"What made me wake you?" said Raphael. "It was so great a pleasure to
watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes."
"And to mine, too," she answered. "I cried in the night while I
watched you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray
listen to me. Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something
rattles in your chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough
when you are asleep, exactly like my father's, who is dying of
phthisis. In those sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the
peculiar symptoms of that complaint. Then you are feverish; I know you
are; your hand was moist and burning----Darling, you are young," she
added with a shudder, "and you could still get over it if
unfortunately----But, no," she cried cheerfully, "there is no
'unfortunately,' the disease is contagious, so the doctors say."
She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one
of those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.
"I do not wish to live to old age," she said. "Let us both die young,
and go to heaven while flowers fill our hands."
"We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,"
Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's hair. But even then a
horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs
that seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the
sufferer ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides
and quivering nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very
marrow of the spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. Raphael
slowly laid himself down, pale, exhausted, and overcome, like a man
who has spent all the strength in him over one final effort. Pauline's
eyes, grown large with terror, were fixed upon him; she lay quite
motionless, pale, and silent.
"Let us commit no more follies, my angel," she said, trying not to let
Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that disturbed her. She covered
her face with her hands, for she saw Death before her--the hideous
skeleton. Raphael's face had grown as pale and livid as any skull
unearthed from a churchyard to assist the studies of some scientific
man. Pauline remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin
the previous evening, and to herself she said:
"Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein love must
bury itself."
On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, Raphael found
himself seated in an armchair, placed in the window in the full light
of day. Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse,
feeling him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The
invalid sought to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on
every movement they made, and on the slightest contractions of their
brows. His last hope lay in this consultation. This court of appeal
was about to pronounce its decision--life or death.
The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine,
a discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that
is preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will
erect the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us
have collected the different materials. As a personal friend of the
Marquis and of Rastignac, he had been in attendance on the former for
some days past, and was helping him to answer the inquiries of the
three professors, occasionally insisting somewhat upon those symptoms
which, in his opinion, pointed to pulmonary disease.
The great doctor shook his head, and so displayed his satisfaction. "I
was sure of it," he seemed to say to himself. He was the illustrious
Brisset, the successor of Cabanis and Bichat, head of the Organic
School, a doctor popular with believers in material and positive
science, who see in man a complete individual, subject solely to the
laws of his own particular organization; and who consider that his
normal condition and abnormal states of disease can both be traced to
obvious causes.
After this reply, Brisset looked, without speaking, at a middle-sized
person, whose darkly flushed countenance and glowing eyes seemed to
belong to some antique satyr; and who, leaning his back against the
corner of the embrasure, was studying Raphael, without saying a word.
Doctor Cameristus, a man of creeds and enthusiasms, the head of the
"Vitalists," a romantic champion of the esoteric doctrines of Van
Helmont, discerned a lofty informing principle in human life, a
mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon which mocks at the scalpel,
deceives the surgeon, eludes the drugs of the pharmacopoeia, the
formulae of algebra, the demonstrations of anatomy, and derides all
our efforts; a sort of invisible, intangible flame, which, obeying
some divinely appointed law, will often linger on in a body in our
opinion devoted to death, while it takes flight from an organization
well fitted for prolonged existence.
A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a
man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the
scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a
concession to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was
perfectly well was dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man
might be living on after his apparent demise. He found something
sensible in every theory, and embraced none of them, claiming that the
best of all systems of medicine was to have none at all, and to stick
to facts. This Panurge of the Clinical Schools, the king of observers,
the great investigator, a great sceptic, the man of desperate
expedients, was scrutinizing the Magic Skin.
After spending about half an hour over taking in some sort the measure
of the patient and the complaint, much as a tailor measures a young
man for a coat when he orders his wedding outfit, the authorities
uttered several commonplaces, and even talked of politics. Then they
decided to go into Raphael's study to exchange their ideas and frame
their verdict.
Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he could slip into
a passage adjoining, whence he could easily overhear the medical
conference in which the three professors were about to engage.
"Permit me, gentlemen," said Brisset, as they entered, "to give you my
own opinion at once. I neither wish to force it upon you nor to have
it discussed. In the first place, it is unbiased, concise, and based
on an exact similarity that exists between one of my own patients and
the subject that we have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I
am expected at my hospital. The importance of the case that demands my
presence there will excuse me for speaking the first word. The subject
with which we are concerned has been exhausted in an equal degree by
intellectual labors--what did he set about, Horace?" he asked of the
young doctor.
"Our learned colleague is taking the effect for the cause," Cameristus
replied. "Yes, the changes that he has observed so keenly certainly
exist in the patient; but it is not the stomach that, by degrees, has
set up nervous action in the system, and so affected the brain, like a
hole in a window pane spreading cracks round about it. It took a blow
of some kind to make a hole in the window; who gave the blow? Do we
know that? Have we investigated the patient's case sufficiently? Are
we acquainted with all the events of his life?
"We cannot trace," he went on more mildly, "to one physical cause the
serious disturbances that supervene in this or that subject which has
been dangerously attacked, nor submit them to a uniform treatment. No
one man is like another. We have each peculiar organs, differently
affected, diversely nourished, adapted to perform different functions,
and to induce a condition necessary to the accomplishment of an order
of things which is unknown to us. The sublime will has so wrought that
a little portion of the great All is set within us to sustain the
phenomena of living; in every man it formulates itself distinctly,
making each, to all appearance, a separate individual, yet in one
point co-existent with the infinite cause. So we ought to make a
separate study of each subject, discover all about it, find out in
what its life consists, and wherein its power lies. From the softness
of a wet sponge to the hardness of pumice-stone there are infinite
fine degrees of difference. Man is just like that. Between the sponge-
like organizations of the lymphatic and the vigorous iron muscles of
such men as are destined for a long life, what a margin for errors for
the single inflexible system of a lowering treatment to commit; a
system that reduces the capacities of the human frame, which you
always conclude have been over-excited. Let us look for the origin of
the disease in the mental and not in the physical viscera. A doctor is
an inspired being, endowed by God with a special gift--the power to
read the secrets of vitality; just as the prophet has received the
eyes that foresee the future, the poet his faculty of evoking nature,
and the musician the power of arranging sounds in an harmonious order
that is possibly a copy of an ideal harmony on high."
Raphael abruptly left the passage, and went back to his armchair. The
four doctors very soon came out of the study; Horace was the
spokesman.
"And that is the cause of the milk in the cocoanut," said Raphael,
with a smile, as he led Horace into his study to pay the fees for this
useless consultation.
"Will you be so kind as not to close the windows, sir?" said an old
lady; "we are being stifled----"
The peculiarly sharp and jarring tones in which the phrase was uttered
grated on Raphael's ears; it fell on them like an indiscreet remark
let slip by some man in whose friendship we would fain believe, a word
which reveals unsuspected depths of selfishness and destroys some
pleasing sentimental illusion of ours. The Marquis glanced, with the
cool inscrutable expression of a diplomatist, at the old lady, called
a servant, and, when he came, curtly bade him:
Great surprise was clearly expressed on all faces at the words. The
whole roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes
upon the invalid, as though he had given some serious offence.
Raphael, who had never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness
of his early youth, felt a momentary confusion; then he shook off his
torpor, exerted his faculties, and asked himself the meaning of this
strange scene.
A sudden and rapid impulse quickened his brain; the past weeks
appeared before him in a clear and definite vision; the reasons for
the feelings he inspired in others stood out for him in relief, like
the veins of some corpse which a naturalist, by some cunningly
contrived injection, has colored so as to show their least
ramifications.
His guests on various occasions, and those to whom he had lent his
horses, had taken offence at his luxurious ways; their ungraciousness
had been a surprise to him; he had spared them further humiliations of
that kind, and they had considered that he looked down upon them, and
had accused him of haughtiness ever since. He could read their inmost
thoughts as he fathomed their natures in this way. Society with its
polish and varnish grew loathsome to him. He was envied and hated for
his wealth and superior ability; his reserve baffled the inquisitive;
his humility seemed like haughtiness to these petty superficial
natures. He guessed the secret unpardonable crime which he had
committed against them; he had overstepped the limits of the
jurisdiction of their mediocrity. He had resisted their inquisitorial
tyranny; he could dispense with their society; and all of them,
therefore, had instinctively combined to make him feel their power,
and to take revenge upon this incipient royalty by submitting him to a
kind of ostracism, and so teaching him that they in their turn could
do without him.
Pity came over him, first of all, at this aspect of mankind, but very
soon he shuddered at the thought of the power that came thus, at will,
and flung aside for him the veil of flesh under which the moral nature
is hidden away. He closed his eyes, so as to see no more. A black
curtain was drawn all at once over this unlucky phantom show of truth;
but still he found himself in the terrible loneliness that surrounds
every power and dominion. Just then a violent fit of coughing seized
him. Far from receiving one single word--indifferent, and meaningless,
it is true, but still containing, among well-bred people brought
together by chance, at least some pretence of civil commiseration--he
now heard hostile ejaculations and muttered complaints. Society there
assembled disdained any pantomime on his account, perhaps because he
had gauged its real nature too well.
"The president of the Club ought to forbid him to enter the salon."
Raphael rose and walked about the rooms to screen himself from their
unanimous execrations. He thought to find a shelter, and went up to a
young pretty lady who sat doing nothing, minded to address some pretty
speeches to her; but as he came towards her, she turned her back upon
him, and pretended to be watching the dancers. Raphael feared lest he
might have made use of the talisman already that evening; and feeling
that he had neither the wish nor the courage to break into the
conversation, he left the salon and took refuge in the billiard-room.
No one there greeted him, nobody spoke to him, no one sent so much as
a friendly glance in his direction. His turn of mind, naturally
meditative, had discovered instinctively the general grounds and
reasons for the aversion he inspired. This little world was obeying,
unconsciously perhaps, the sovereign law which rules over polite
society; its inexorable nature was becoming apparent in its entirety
to Raphael's eyes. A glance into the past showed it to him, as a type
completely realized in Foedora.
He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily ills than he
had received it at her hands for the distress in his heart. The
fashionable world expels every suffering creature from its midst, just
as the body of a man in robust health rejects any germ of disease. The
world holds suffering and misfortune in abhorrence; it dreads them
like the plague; it never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice
is a luxury. Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but society
can belittle it and make it ridiculous by an epigram. Society draws
caricatures, and in this way flings in the teeth of fallen kings the
affronts which it fancies it has received from them; society, like the
Roman youth at the circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator;
mockery and money are its vital necessities. "Death to the weak!" That
is the oath taken by this kind of Equestrian order, instituted in
their midst by all the nations of the world; everywhere it makes for
the elevation of the rich, and its motto is deeply graven in hearts
that wealth has turned to stone, or that have been reared in
aristocratic prejudices.
"I have only to let them know my power to make them worship my
coughing fits," he said to himself, and wrapped himself against the
world in the cloak of his contempt.
Next day the resident doctor came to call upon him, and took an
anxious interest in his health. Raphael felt a thrill of joy at the
friendly words addressed to him. The doctor's face, to his thinking,
wore an expression that was kind and pleasant; the pale curls of his
wig seemed redolent of philanthropy; the square cut of his coat, the
loose folds of his trousers, his big Quaker-like shoes, everything
about him down to the powder shaken from his queue and dusted in a
circle upon his slightly stooping shoulders, revealed an apostolic
nature, and spoke of Christian charity and of the self-sacrifice of a
man, who, out of sheer devotion to his patients, had compelled himself
to learn to play whist and tric-trac so well that he never lost money
to any of them.
"My Lord Marquis," said he, after a long talk with Raphael, "I can
dispel your uneasiness beyond all doubt. I know your constitution well
enough by this time to assure you that the doctors in Paris, whose
great abilities I know, are mistaken as to the nature of your
complaint. You can live as long as Methuselah, my Lord Marquis,
accidents only excepted. Your lungs are as sound as a blacksmith's
bellows, your stomach would put an ostrich to the blush; but if you
persist in living at high altitude, you are running the risk of a
prompt interment in consecrated soil. A few words, my Lord Marquis,
will make my meaning clear to you.
"Chemistry," he began, "has shown us that man's breathing is a real
process of combustion, and the intensity of its action varies
according to the abundance or scarcity of the phlogistic element
stored up by the organism of each individual. In your case, the
phlogistic, or inflammatory element is abundant; if you will permit me
to put it so, you generate superfluous oxygen, possessing as you do
the inflammatory temperament of a man destined to experience strong
emotions. While you breath the keen, pure air that stimulates life in
men of lymphatic constitution, you are accelerating an expenditure of
vitality already too rapid. One of the conditions for existence for
you is the heavier atmosphere of the plains and valleys. Yes, the
vital air for a man consumed by his genius lies in the fertile
pasture-lands of Germany, at Toplitz or Baden-Baden. If England is not
obnoxious to you, its misty climate would reduce your fever; but the
situation of our baths, a thousand feet above the level of the
Mediterranean, is dangerous for you. That is my opinion at least," he
said, with a deprecatory gesture, "and I give it in opposition to our
interests, for, if you act upon it, we shall unfortunately lose you."
But for these closing words of his, the affable doctor's seeming good-
nature would have completely won Raphael over; but he was too
profoundly observant not to understand the meaning of the tone, the
look and gesture that accompanied that mild sarcasm, not to see that
the little man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of
his rejoicing patients. The florid-looking idlers, tedious old women,
nomad English people, and fine ladies who had given their husbands the
slip, and were escorted hither by their lovers--one and all were in a
plot to drive away a wretched, feeble creature to die, who seemed
unable to hold out against a daily renewed persecution! Raphael
accepted the challenge, he foresaw some amusement to be derived from
their manoeuvres.
"As you would be grieved at losing me," said he to the doctor, "I will
endeavor to avail myself of your good advice without leaving the
place. I will set about having a house built to-morrow, and the
atmosphere within it shall be regulated by your instructions."
The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked about Raphael's
mouth, and took his leave without finding another word to say.
The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the Mediterranean,
in a great hollow among the jagged peaks of the hills; it sparkles
there, the bluest drop of water in the world. From the summit of the
Cat's Tooth the lake below looks like a stray turquoise. This lovely
sheet of water is about twenty-seven miles round, and in some places
is nearly five hundred feet deep.
Under the cloudless sky, in your boat in the midst of the great
expanse of water, with only the sound of the oars in your ears, only
the vague outline of the hills on the horizon before you; you admire
the glittering snows of the French Maurienne; you pass, now by masses
of granite clad in the velvet of green turf or in low-growing shrubs,
now by pleasant sloping meadows; there is always a wilderness on the
one hand and fertile lands on the other, and both harmonies and
dissonances compose a scene for you where everything is at once small
and vast, and you feel yourself to be a poor onlooker at a great
banquet. The configuration of the mountains brings about misleading
optical conditions and illusions of perspective; a pine-tree a hundred
feet in height looks to be a mere weed; wide valleys look as narrow as
meadow paths. The lake is the only one where the confidences of heart
and heart can be exchanged. There one can live; there one can
meditate. Nowhere on earth will you find a closer understanding
between the water, the sky, the mountains, and the fields. There is a
balm there for all the agitations of life. The place keeps the secrets
of sorrow to itself, the sorrow that grows less beneath its soothing
influence; and to love, it gives a grave and meditative cast,
deepening passion and purifying it. A kiss there becomes something
great. But beyond all other things it is the lake for memories; it
aids them by lending to them the hues of its own waves; it is a mirror
in which everything is reflected. Only here, with this lovely
landscape all around him, could Raphael endure the burden laid upon
him; here he could remain as a languid dreamer, without a wish of his
own.
He went out upon the lake after the doctor's visit, and was landed at
a lonely point on the pleasant slope where the village of Saint-
Innocent is situated. The view from this promontory, as one may call
it, comprises the heights of Bugey with the Rhone flowing at their
foot, and the end of the lake; but Raphael liked to look at the
opposite shore from thence, at the melancholy looking Abbey of Haute-
Combe, the burying-place of the Sardinian kings, who lie prostrate
there before the hills, like pilgrims come at last to their journey's
end. The silence of the landscape was broken by the even rhythm of the
strokes of the oar; it seemed to find a voice for the place, in
monotonous cadences like the chanting of monks. The Marquis was
surprised to find visitors to this usually lonely part of the lake;
and as he mused, he watched the people seated in the boat, and
recognized in the stern the elderly lady who had spoken so harshly to
him the evening before.
No one took any notice of Raphael as the boat passed, except the
elderly lady's companion, a poor old maid of noble family, who bowed
to him, and whom it seemed to him that he saw for the first time. A
few seconds later he had already forgotten the visitors, who had
rapidly disappeared behind the promontory, when he heard the
fluttering of a dress and the sound of light footsteps not far from
him. He turned about and saw the companion; and, guessing from her
embarrassed manner that she wished to speak with him, he walked
towards her.
She was somewhere about thirty-six years of age, thin and tall,
reserved and prim, and, like all old maids, seemed puzzled to know
which way to look, an expression no longer in keeping with her
measured, springless, and hesitating steps. She was both young and old
at the same time, and, by a certain dignity in her carriage, showed
the high value which she set upon her charms and perfections. In
addition, her movements were all demure and discreet, like those of
women who are accustomed to take great care of themselves, no doubt
because they desire not to be cheated of love, their destined end.
"Your life is in danger, sir; do not come to the Club again!" she
said, stepping back a pace or two from Raphael, as if her reputation
had already been compromised.
"True," the old maid answered. She looked at him, quaking like an owl
out in the sunlight. "But think of yourself," she went on; "several
young men, who want to drive you away from the baths, have agreed to
pick a quarrel with you, and to force you into a duel."
The key of every science is, beyond cavil, the mark of interrogation;
we owe most of our greatest discoveries to a WHY? and all the wisdom
in the world, perhaps, consists in asking WHEREFORE? in every
connection. But, on the other hand, this acquired prescience is the
ruin of our illusions.
So Valentin, having taken the old maid's kindly action for the text of
his wandering thoughts, without the deliberate promptings of
philosophy, must find it full of gall and wormwood.
Very soon the old maid and her elderly innocence became, in his eyes,
a fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious little world. It
was a paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece of priest's or woman's
craft. Was the duel a myth, or did they merely want to frighten him?
But these petty creatures, impudent and teasing as flies, had
succeeded in wounding his vanity, in rousing his pride, and exciting
his curiosity. Unwilling to become their dupe, or to be taken for a
coward, and even diverted perhaps by the little drama, he went to the
Club that very evening.
"You?"
"Yes, I."
"I am deputed, sir," he said coolly addressing the Marquis, "to make
you aware of something which you do not seem to know; your face and
person generally are a source of annoyance to every one here, and to
me in particular. You have too much politeness not to sacrifice
yourself to the public good, and I beg that you will not show yourself
in the Club again."
"This sort of joke has been perpetrated before, sir, in garrison towns
at the time of the Empire; but nowadays it is exceedingly bad form,"
said Raphael drily.
"I am not joking," the young man answered; "and I repeat it: your
health will be considerably the worse for a stay here; the heat and
light, the air of the saloon, and the company are all bad for your
complaint."
"There is one last degree left for you to take," said Valentin; "study
the ordinary rules of politeness, and you will be a perfect
gentlemen."
The young men all came out of the billiard-room just then, some
disposed to laugh, some silent. The attention of other players was
drawn to the matter; they left their cards to watch a quarrel that
rejoiced their instincts. Raphael, alone among this hostile crowd, did
his best to keep cool, and not to put himself in any way in the wrong;
but his adversary having ventured a sarcasm containing an insult
couched in unusually keen language, he replied gravely:
"We cannot box men's ears, sir, in these days, but I am at a loss for
any word by which to stigmatize such cowardly behavior as yours."
"We shall do very nicely here; glorious weather for a duel!" he cried
gaily, looking at the blue vault of sky above, at the waters of the
lake, and the rocks, without a single melancholy presentiment or doubt
of the issue. "If I wing him," he went on, "I shall send him to bed
for a month; eh, doctor?"
"At the very least," the surgeon replied; "but let that willow twig
alone, or you will weary your wrist, and then you will not fire
steadily. You might kill your man instead of wounding him."
"Here he is," said the seconds, who soon descried a caleche coming
along the road; it was drawn by four horses, and there were two
postilions.
"I have not slept all night, sir;" so Raphael greeted his antagonist.
The icy tone and terrible glance that went with the words made the
real aggressor shudder; he know that he was in the wrong, and felt in
secret ashamed of his behavior. There was something strange in
Raphael's bearing, tone, and gesture; the Marquis stopped, and every
one else was likewise silent. The uneasy and constrained feeling grew
to a height.
"There is yet time," he went on, "to offer me some slight apology; and
offer it you must, or you will die sir! You rely even now on your
dexterity, and do not shrink from an encounter in which you believe
all the advantage to be upon your side. Very good, sir; I am generous,
I am letting you know my superiority beforehand. I possess a terrible
power. I have only to wish to do so, and I can neutralize your skill,
dim your eyesight, make your hand and pulse unsteady, and even kill
you outright. I have no wish to be compelled to exercise my power; the
use of it costs me too dear. You would not be the only one to die. So
if you refuse to apologize to me, not matter what your experience in
murder, your ball will go into the waterfall there, and mine will
speed straight to your heart though I do not aim it at you."
Confused voices interrupted Raphael at this point. All the time that
he was speaking, the Marquis had kept his intolerably keen gaze fixed
upon his antagonist; now he drew himself up and showed an impassive
face, like that of a dangerous madman.
"Make him hold his tongue," the young man had said to one of his
seconds; "that voice of his is tearing the heart out of me."
"Say no more, sir; it is quite useless," cried the seconds and the
surgeon, addressing Raphael.
The two antagonists were placed at fifteen paces' distance from each
other. Each of them had a brace of pistols at hand, and, according to
the programme prescribed for them, each was to fire twice when and how
he pleased, but after the signal had been given by the seconds.
"What are you doing, Charles?" exclaimed the young man who acted as
second to Raphael's antagonist; "you are putting in the ball before
the powder!"
"The sun lies behind you," said Valentin sternly and solemnly, while
he coolly loaded his pistol without heeding the fact that the signal
had been given, or that his antagonist was carefully taking aim.
There was something so appalling in this supernatural unconcern, that
it affected even the two postilions, brought thither by a cruel
curiosity. Raphael was either trying his power or playing with it, for
he talked to Jonathan, and looked towards him as he received his
adversary's fire. Charles' bullet broke a branch of willow, and
ricocheted over the surface of the water; Raphael fired at random, and
shot his antagonist through the heart. He did not heed the young man
as he dropped; he hurriedly sought the Magic Skin to see what another
man's life had cost him. The talisman was no larger than a small oak-
leaf.
"What are you gaping at, you postilions over there? Let us be off,"
said the Marquis.
That same evening he crossed the French border, immediately set out
for Auvergne, and reached the springs of Mont Dore. As he traveled,
there surged up in his heart, all at once, one of those thoughts that
come to us as a ray of sunlight pierces through the thick mists in
some dark valley--a sad enlightenment, a pitiless sagacity that lights
up the accomplished fact for us, that lays our errors bare, and leaves
us without excuse in our own eyes. It suddenly struck him that the
possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring with it the
knowledge how to use it. The sceptre is a plaything for a child, an
axe for a Richelieu, and for a Napoleon a lever by which to move the
world. Power leaves us just as it finds us; only great natures grow
greater by its means. Raphael had had everything in his power, and he
had done nothing.
The day after he arrived he climbed the Pic de Sancy, not without
difficulty, and visited the higher valleys, the skyey nooks,
undiscovered lakes, and peasants' huts about Mont Dore, a country
whose stern and wild features are now beginning to tempt the brushes
of our artists, for sometimes wonderfully fresh and charming views are
to be found there, affording a strong contrast to the frowning brows
of those lonely hills.
At the bottom of this cup, which perhaps had been the crater of an
old-world volcano, lay a pool of water as pure and bright as a
diamond. Granite boulders lay around the deep basin, and willows,
mountain-ash trees, yellow-flag lilies, and numberless aromatic plants
bloomed about it, in a realm of meadow as fresh as an English bowling-
green. The fine soft grass was watered by the streams that trickled
through the fissures in the cliffs; the soil was continually enriched
by the deposits of loam which storms washed down from the heights
above. The pool might be some three acres in extent; its shape was
irregular, and the edges were scalloped like the hem of a dress; the
meadow might be an acre or two acres in extent. The cliffs and the
water approached and receded from each other; here and there, there
was scarcely width enough for the cows to pass between them.
After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air the granite
took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty
tints that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the
sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides,
pictures of wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the
pretty view of the valley; and so strange were the shapes they
assumed, that one of the cliffs had been called "The Capuchin,"
because it was so like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks,
these mighty masses of rock, and airy caverns were lighted up one by
one, according to the direction of the sun or the caprices of the
atmosphere; they caught gleams of gold, dyed themselves in purple;
took a tint of glowing rose-color, or turned dull and gray. Upon the
heights a drama of color was always to be seen, a play of ever-
shifting iridescent hues like those on a pigeon's breast.
Some clothes spread out on the gooseberry bushes were drying in the
sun. A cat was sitting on a machine for stripping hemp; beneath it lay
a newly scoured brass caldron, among a quantity of potato-parings. On
the other side of the house Raphael saw a sort of barricade of dead
thorn-bushes, meant no doubt to keep the poultry from scratching up
the vegetables and pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. The
dwelling was like some bird's-nest ingeniously set in a cranny of the
rocks, a clever and at the same time a careless bit of workmanship. A
simple and kindly nature lay round about it; its rusticity was
genuine, but there was a charm like that of poetry in it; for it grew
and throve at a thousand miles' distance from our elaborate and
conventional poetry. It was like none of our conceptions; it was a
spontaneous growth, a masterpiece due to chance.
As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right
to left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the
yellowish or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the
green leaves, the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the
climbing plants with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of
the mosses, the purple-tinted blooms of the heather,--everything was
either brought into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of
the light or by the contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of
all with the sheet of water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite
peaks, and the sky were all faithfully reflected. Everything had a
radiance of its own in this delightful picture, from the sparkling
mica-stone to the bleached tuft of grass hidden away in the soft
shadows; the spotted cow with its glossy hide, the delicate water-
plants that hung down over the pool like fringes in a nook where blue
or emerald colored insects were buzzing about, the roots of trees like
a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above grotesque faces in the flinty
rock surface,--all these things made a harmony for the eye.
The odor of the tepid water; the scent of the flowers, and the breath
of the caverns which filled the lonely place gave Raphael a sensation
that was almost enjoyment. Silence reigned in majesty over these
woods, which possibly are unknown to the tax-collector; but the
barking of a couple of dogs broke the stillness all at once; the cows
turned their heads towards the entrance of the valley, showing their
moist noses to Raphael, stared stupidly at him, and then fell to
browsing again. A goat and her kid, that seemed to hang on the side of
the crags in some magical fashion, capered and leapt to a slab of
granite near to Raphael, and stayed there a moment, as if to seek to
know who he was. The yapping of the dogs brought out a plump child,
who stood agape, and next came a white-haired old man of middle
height. Both of these two beings were in keeping with the
surroundings, the air, the flowers, and the dwelling. Health appeared
to overflow in this fertile region; old age and childhood thrived
there. There seemed to be, about all these types of existence, the
freedom and carelessness of the life of primitive times, a happiness
of use and wont that gave the lie to our philosophical platitudes, and
wrought a cure of all its swelling passions in the heart.
The old man belonged to the type of model dear to the masculine brush
of Schnetz. The countless wrinkles upon his brown face looked as if
they would be hard to the touch; the straight nose, the prominent
cheek-bones, streaked with red veins like a vine-leaf in autumn, the
angular features, all were characteristics of strength, even where
strength existed no longer. The hard hands, now that they toiled no
longer, had preserved their scanty white hair, his bearing was that of
an absolutely free man; it suggested the thought that, had he been an
Italian, he would have perhaps turned brigand, for the love of the
liberty so dear to him. The child was a regular mountaineer, with the
black eyes that can face the sun without flinching, a deeply tanned
complexion, and rough brown hair. His movements were like a bird's--
swift, decided, and unconstrained; his clothing was ragged; the white,
fair skin showed through the rents in his garments. There they both
stood in silence, side by side, both obeying the same impulse; in both
faces were clear tokens of an absolutely identical and idle life. The
old man had adopted the child's amusements, and the child had fallen
in with the old man's humor; there was a sort of tacit agreement
between two kinds of feebleness, between failing powers well-nigh
spent and powers just about to unfold themselves.
Very soon a woman who seemed to be about thirty years old appeared on
the threshold of the door, spinning as she came. She was an
Auvergnate, a high-colored, comfortable-looking, straightforward sort
of person, with white teeth; her cap and dress, the face, full figure,
and general appearance, were of the Auvergne peasant stamp. So was her
dialect; she was a thorough embodiment of her district; its
hardworking ways, its thrift, ignorance, and heartiness all met in
her.
She greeted Raphael, and they began to talk. The dogs quieted down;
the old man went and sat on a bench in the sun; the child followed his
mother about wherever she went, listening without saying a word, and
staring at the stranger.
"What should we be afraid of, sir? When we bolt the door, who ever
could get inside? Oh, no, we aren't afraid at all. And besides," she
said, as she brought the Marquis into the principal room in the house,
"what should thieves come to take from us here?"
She designated the room as she spoke; the smoke-blackened walls, with
some brilliant pictures in blue, red, and green, an "End of Credit," a
Crucifixion, and the "Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard" for their sole
ornament; the furniture here and there, the old wooden four-post
bedstead, the table with crooked legs, a few stools, the chest that
held the bread, the flitch that hung from the ceiling, a jar of salt,
a stove, and on the mantleshelf a few discolored yellow plaster
figures. As he went out again Raphael noticed a man half-way up the
crags, leaning on a hoe, and watching the house with interest.
Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings
and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug's one
breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered
admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf, that bring the
colors of a rose window in some Gothic cathedral into contrast with
the reddish background? Who has not looked long in delight at the
effects of sun and rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or
at the variously shaped petals of the flower-cups? Who has not sunk
into these idle, absorbing meditations on things without, that have no
conscious end, yet lead to some definite thought at last. Who, in
short, has not led a lazy life, the life of childhood, the life of the
savage without his labor? This life without a care or a wish Raphael
led for some days' space. He felt a distinct improvement in his
condition, a wonderful sense of ease, that quieted his apprehensions
and soothed his sufferings.
He would climb the crags, and then find a seat high up on some peak
whence he could see a vast expanse of distant country at a glance, and
he would spend whole days in this way, like a plant in the sun, or a
hare in its form. And at last, growing familiar with the appearances
of the plant-life about him, and of the changes in the sky, he
minutely noted the progress of everything working around him in the
water, on the earth, or in the air. He tried to share the secret
impulses of nature, sought by passive obedience to become a part of
it, and to lie within the conservative and despotic jurisdiction that
regulates instinctive existence. He no longer wished to steer his own
course.
One morning he had lain in bed till noon, deep in the dreams between
sleep and waking, which give to realities a fantastic appearance, and
make the wildest fancies seem solid facts; while he was still
uncertain that he was not dreaming yet, he suddenly heard his hostess
giving a report of his health to Jonathan, for the first time.
Jonathan came to inquire after him daily, and the Auvergnate, thinking
no doubt that Valentin was still asleep, had not lowered the tones of
a voice developed in mountain air.
"No better and no worse," she said. "He coughed all last night again
fit to kill himself. Poor gentleman, he coughs and spits till it is
piteous. My husband and I often wonder to each other where he gets the
strength from to cough like that. It goes to your heart. What a cursed
complaint it is! He has no strength at all. I am always afraid I shall
find him dead in his bed some morning. He is every bit as pale as a
waxen Christ. DAME! I watch him while he dresses; his poor body is as
thin as a nail. And he does not feel well now; but no matter. It's all
the same; he wears himself out with running about as if he had health
and to spare. All the same, he is very brave, for he never complains
at all. But really he would be better under the earth than on it, for
he is enduring the agonies of Christ. I don't wish that myself, sir;
it is quite in our interests; but even if he didn't pay us what he
does, I should be just as fond of him; it is not our own interest that
is our motive.
"Ah, mon Dieu!" she continued, "Parisians are the people for these
dogs' diseases. Where did he catch it, now? Poor young man! And he is
so sure that he is going to get well! That fever just gnaws him, you
know; it eats him away; it will be the death of him. He has no notion
whatever of that; he does not know it, sir; he sees nothing----You
mustn't cry about him, M. Jonathan; you must remember that he will be
happy, and will not suffer any more. You ought to make a neuvaine for
him; I have seen wonderful cures come of the nine days' prayer, and I
would gladly pay for a wax taper to save such a gentle creature, so
good he is, a paschal lamb----"
As Raphael's voice had grown too weak to allow him to make himself
heard, he was compelled to listen to this horrible loquacity. His
irritation, however, drove him out of bed at length, and he appeared
upon the threshold.
"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping away his tears.
"And for the future you had very much better not come here without my
orders."
In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat
down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow
path along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base
of the hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some
malicious power interpreted for him all the woman's forebodings, and
filled the breeze and the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled
with horror, he took refuge among the highest summits of the
mountains, and stayed there till the evening; but yet he could not
drive away the gloomy presentiments awakened within him in such an
unfortunate manner by a cruel solicitude on his account.
"The damp is falling now, sir," said she. "If you stop out there, you
will go off just like rotten fruit. You must come in. It isn't healthy
to breathe the damp, and you have taken nothing since the morning,
besides."
"Your grave, sir! I dig your grave!--and where may your grave be? I
want to see you as old as father there, and not in your grave by any
manner of means. The grave! that comes soon enough for us all; in the
grave----"
"No."
The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and
it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. Hatred is a tonic--it
quickens life and stimulates revenge; but pity is death to us--it
makes our weakness weaker still. It is as if distress simpered
ingratiatingly at us; contempt lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness
in an affront. In the centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a
wondering pity in the child's eyes, an officious pity in the woman,
and in her husband a pity that had an interested motive; but no matter
how the sentiment declared itself, death was always its import.
He traveled through the night, and awoke as they passed through one of
the pleasant valleys of the Bourbonnais. View after view swam before
his gaze, and passed rapidly away like the vague pictures of a dream.
Cruel nature spread herself out before his eyes with tantalizing
grace. Sometimes the Allier, a liquid shining ribbon, meandered
through the distant fertile landscape; then followed the steeples of
hamlets, hiding modestly in the depths of a ravine with its yellow
cliffs; sometimes, after the monotony of vineyards, the watermills of
a little valley would be suddenly seen; and everywhere there were
pleasant chateaux, hillside villages, roads with their fringes of
queenly poplars; and the Loire itself, at last, with its wide sheets
of water sparkling like diamonds amid its golden sands. Attractions
everywhere, without end! This nature, all astir with a life and
gladness like that of childhood, scarcely able to contain the impulses
and sap of June, possessed a fatal attraction for the darkened gaze of
the invalid. He drew the blinds of his carriage windows, and betook
himself again to slumber.
The next day found him back in his home again, in his own room, beside
his own fireside. He had had a large fire lighted; he felt cold.
Jonathan brought him some letters; they were all from Pauline. He
opened the first one without any eagerness, and unfolded it as if it
had been the gray-paper form of application for taxes made by the
revenue collector. He read the first sentence:
"Gone! This really is a flight, my Raphael. How is it? No one can tell
me where you are. And who should know if not I?"
He did not wish to learn any more. He calmly took up the letters and
threw them in the fire, watching with dull and lifeless eyes the
perfumed paper as it was twisted, shriveled, bent, and devoured by the
capricious flames. Fragments that fell among the ashes allowed him to
see the beginning of a sentence, or a half-burnt thought or word; he
took a pleasure in deciphering them--a sort of mechanical amusement.
The words caused him a sort of remorse; he seized the tongs, and
rescued a last fragment of the letter from the flames.
Raphael laid the scorched scrap on the mantelpiece, then all at once
he flung it into the fire. The bit of paper was too clearly a symbol
of his own love and luckless existence.
"Can you prescribe a draught for me--some mild opiate which will
always keep me in a somnolent condition, a draught that will not be
injurious although taken constantly."
"Nothing is easier," the young doctor replied; "but you will have to
keep on your feet for a few hours daily, at any rate, so as to take
your food."
"A few hours!" Raphael broke in; "no, no! I only wish to be out of bed
for an hour at most."
"To sleep; for so one keeps alive, at any rate," the patient answered.
"Let no one come in, not even Mlle. Pauline de Wistchnau!" he added to
Jonathan, as the doctor was writing out his prescription.
"Well, M. Horace, is there any hope?" the old servant asked, going as
far as the flight of steps before the door, with the young doctor.
"He may live for some time yet, or he may die to-night. The chances of
life and death are evenly balanced in his case. I can't understand it
at all," said the doctor, with a doubtful gesture. "His mind ought to
be diverted."
"Diverted! Ah, sir, you don't know him! He killed a man the other day
without a word!--Nothing can divert him!"
For some days Raphael lay plunged in the torpor of this artificial
sleep. Thanks to the material power that opium exerts over the
immaterial part of us, this man with the powerful and active
imagination reduced himself to the level of those sluggish forms of
animal life that lurk in the depths of forests, and take the form of
vegetable refuse, never stirring from their place to catch their easy
prey. He had darkened the very sun in heaven; the daylight never
entered his room. About eight o'clock in the evening he would leave
his bed, with no very clear consciousness of his own existence; he
would satisfy the claims of hunger and return to bed immediately. One
dull blighted hour after another only brought confused pictures and
appearances before him, and lights and shadows against a background of
darkness. He lay buried in deep silence; movement and intelligence
were completely annihilated for him. He woke later than usual one
evening, and found that his dinner was not ready. He rang for
Jonathan.
"You can go," he said. "I have made you rich; you shall be happy in
your old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer.
Miserable wretch! I am hungry--where is my dinner? How is it?--Answer
me!"
His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers
from his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the
table sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal
banquet was spread--the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the
nervous fibres of the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among
beautiful women in full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders,
with flowers in their hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling
eyes, attractively and fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish
jacket, which displayed the alluring outlines of her form; one wore
the "basquina" of Andalusia, with its wanton grace; here was a half-
clad Dian the huntress, there the costume of Mlle. de la Valliere,
amorous and coy; and all of them alike were given up to the
intoxication of the moment.
"Monster!" he cried, "so you have sworn to kill me!" and trembling at
the risks he had just now run, he summoned all his energies, reached
his room, took a powerful sleeping draught, and went to bed.
"Go! go! leave me," Raphael muttered at last. "Why do you not go? If
you stay, I shall die. Do you want to see me die?"
"Die?" she echoed. "Can you die without me? Die? But you are young;
and I love you! Die?" she asked, in a deep, hollow voice. She seized
his hands with a frenzied movement. "Cold!" she wailed. "Is it all an
illusion?"
Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as
tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He showed it to her.
The young girl thought that Valentin had grown lightheaded; she took
the talisman and went to fetch the lamp. By its tremulous light which
she shed over Raphael and the talisman, she scanned her lover's face
and the last morsel of the magic skin. As Pauline stood there, in all
the beauty of love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control
his thoughts; memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and fevered
joys, overwhelmed the soul that had so long lain dormant within him,
and kindled a fire not quite extinct.
A dreadful cry came from the girl's throat, her eyes dilated with
horror, her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by an unspeakable
anguish; she read in Raphael's eyes the vehement desire in which she
had once exulted, but as it grew she felt a light movement in her
hand, and the skin contracted. She did not stop to think; she fled
into the next room, and locked the door.
"Pauline! Pauline!" cried the dying man, as he rushed after her; "I
love you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline! I wish to die in your
arms!"
With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he broke down
the door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a sofa. Pauline had
vainly tried to pierce her heart, and now thought to find a rapid
death by strangling herself with her shawl.
"If I die, he will live," she said, trying to tighten the knot that
she had made.
In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoulders were
bare, her clothing was disordered, her eyes were bathed in tears, her
face was flushed and drawn with the horror of despair; yet as her
exceeding beauty met Raphael's intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He
sprang towards her like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried
to take her in his arms.
The dying man sought for words to express the wish that was consuming
his strength; but no sounds would come except the choking death-rattle
in his chest. Each breath he drew sounded hollower than the last, and
seemed to come from his very entrails. At the last moment, no longer
able to utter a sound, he set his teeth in Pauline's breast. Jonathan
appeared, terrified by the cries he had heard, and tried to tear away
the dead body from the grasp of the girl who was crouching with it in
a corner.
"What do you want?" she asked. "He is mine, I have killed him. Did I
not foresee how it would be?"
EPILOGUE
"But, Pauline?"
"You do not see, then? I will begin again. Make way! make way! She
comes, she is here, the queen of illusions, a woman fleeting as a
kiss, a woman bright as lightning, issuing in a blaze like lightning
from the sky, a being uncreated, of spirit and love alone. She has
wrapped her shadowy form in flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that
she exists but for a moment. The pure outlines of her shape tell you
that she comes from heaven. Is she not radiant as an angel? Can you
not hear the beating of her wings in space? She sinks down beside you
more lightly than a bird, and you are entranced by her awful eyes;
there is a magical power in her light breathing that draws your lips
to hers; she flies and you follow; you feel the earth beneath you no
longer. If you could but once touch that form of snow with your eager,
deluded hands, once twine the golden hair round your fingers, place
one kiss on those shining eyes! There is an intoxicating vapor around,
and the spell of a siren music is upon you. Every nerve in you is
quivering; you are filled with pain and longing. O joy for which there
is no name! You have touched the woman's lips, and you are awakened at
once by a horrible pang. Oh! ah! yes, you have struck your head
against the corner of the bedpost, you have been clasping its brown
mahogany sides, and chilly gilt ornaments; embracing a piece of metal,
a brazen Cupid."
"What, again? Listen. One lovely morning at Tours a young man, who
held the hand of a pretty woman in his, went on board the Ville
d'Angers. Thus united they both looked and wondered long at a white
form that rose elusively out of the mists above the broad waters of
the Loire, like some child of the sun and the river, or some freak of
air and cloud. This translucent form was a sylph or a naiad by turns;
she hovered in the air like a word that haunts the memory, which seeks
in vain to grasp it; she glided among the islands, she nodded her head
here and there among the tall poplar trees; then she grew to a giant's
height; she shook out the countless folds of her drapery to the light;
she shot light from the aureole that the sun had litten about her
face; she hovered above the slopes of the hills and their little
hamlets, and seemed to bar the passage of the boat before the Chateau
d'Usse. You might have thought that La dame des belles cousines sought
to protect her country from modern intrusion."
"Oh! Foedora, you are sure to meet with her! She was at the Bouffons
last night, and she will go to the Opera this evening, and if you like
to take it so, she is Society."
ADDENDUM
Aquilina
Melmoth Reconciled
Bianchon, Horace
Father Goriot
The Atheist's Mass
Cesar Birotteau
The Commission in Lunacy
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor's Establishment
The Secrets of a Princess
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
A Second Home
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche
Euphrasia
Melmoth Reconciled
Joseph
A Study of Woman
Massol
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
A Daughter of Eve
Cousin Betty
The Unconscious Humorists
Navarreins, Duc de
A Bachelor's Establishment
Colonel Chabert
The Muse of the Department
The Thirteen
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Peasantry
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
The Country Parson
The Gondreville Mystery
The Secrets of a Princess
Cousin Betty
Rastignac, Eugene de
Father Goriot
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
The Ball at Sceaux
The Interdiction
A Study of Woman
Another Study of Woman
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
The Gondreville Mystery
The Firm of Nucingen
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
The Unconscious Humorists
Taillefer, Jean-Frederic
The Firm of Nucingen
Father Goriot
The Red Inn
End